


Into the earth I trampled it down

by deadendtracks (amonitrate)



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst and Tragedy, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Child Loss, Disordered Eating, Drinking, Drug Use, Drug Withdrawal, During Canon, Episode Tag, Gen, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Missing Scene, Overdosing, Past Drug Addiction, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, Season/Series 03, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-12 10:50:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 33,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17466146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amonitrate/pseuds/deadendtracks
Summary: Tommy on a good day could be a terror to predict and she needed to know which way he was going to jump. She’d expected rage, cold or hot. Not whatever this was.Polly struggles to get Tommy from Grace’s murder to her funeral in one piece while the Russian business hangs over their heads like the Sword of Damocles.Takes place between 3.02 and 3.03.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> title is a lyric from PJ Harvey’s song “Grow Grow Grow”
> 
> Many, many thanks to @veneredirimmel for alpha and beta reading and long discussions about the show
> 
>  
> 
> Given the POV of this fic, the opinions expressed within are Polly's own.

When Polly arrived at the hospital the officers on duty didn’t know her. For fear of more violence the police had set up a barricade at the entrance and she’d had to cause a bloody scene to get anywhere; only after she’d demanded they bring Moss did they allow her through, then it took her another tense few minutes searching the halls to find Tommy himself. He was sitting straight backed in a chair against the tile wall outside the surgery and Ada was with him, holding one of his hands, her face pinched in a way it hadn’t been since Freddie was ill. As she neared, Ada turned to Tommy and squeezed his hand. “I’ll just be over here, with Polly,” she said to him very gently.

Polly could see his throat work around a swallow as he blinked, heavy lids over empty eyes, and it was worse than right after the war, this blankness, like his body was all that was left of him. Ada took her arm and Polly let her lead them a few feet away, but not as far as she’d thought they would go, not out of earshot. Ada seemed to catch her thoughts because she sighed. “I don’t think he’s listening,” she said, but that wasn’t what she meant.

He’d been frantic but in command back in the ballroom, shouting orders while pressing a wad of pale silk torn from Grace’s own dress against the wound in her chest, everything done with the kind of ingrained competence bought by hard experience. Polly had sent Ada after him in the ambulance and stayed behind to manage the police and whatever guests had not fled and to make sure Changretta’s man was dealt with. By the time she’d reached the hospital Grace had been dead. Whatever happened before she arrived looked to have rocked Ada on her foundations. And Tommy...

Polly glanced over at him again and frowned.“Did they give him something? The doctors?”

“No.” Ada’s hands were trembling a little still, hours after the shooting had stopped. “They wanted to. But he-- no.” There was a story there, but Polly filed it away for later.

“Have the police talked to him yet?”

Ada shook her head. “The hospital wouldn’t let them up here. Can we take him home now?”

“Moss wants him interviewed first,” Polly said. Moss was livid and had had things to say about Tommy dragging his gangster business into society life, but that was neither here nor there.

Ada hugged herself and glanced back toward Tommy. “They’re not going to get anything useful from him.”

It was too careful, that. Polly studied Ada’s washed out face for clues. Tommy on a good day could be a terror to predict and she needed to know which way he was going to jump. She’d expected rage, cold or hot. Not whatever this was.

“Has he spoken at all?” At the question, Ada looked at her sidelong, her mouth a thin line. Considering. “Ada, you need to be straight with me now.”

Ada’s dress was rumpled and her hair had come half undone, and Polly wondered at that, because she’d still been neat as a pin before the ambulance had come.

“He kept asking about Charlie. They said it’s shock.”

There was a smear of blood dried on Tommy’s forehead and a dark patch on the front of his tuxedo shirt. His hands were clean where they lay loose in his lap, and Polly wondered if Ada had done that, because in the ballroom they’d been red with Grace’s blood to the cuffs.

“I’ll tell the police they can talk to him tomorrow,” Polly said. “I won’t give them a bloody choice. And I’ll have Arthur bring the car round front.”

“Polly--” Ada took a deep breath. “It would be best if it was just us in the car with him. You and me, I mean.”

Tommy’s face was grey and drawn and nothing about him suggested he knew they were there, talking about him, a few yards away.

Polly gave Ada a nod and left to deliver marching orders to the police.

 

Moss hadn’t been happy but he also hadn’t argued. He wasn’t a bad man, Moss, for a copper, and he’d arrived at the gala before the ambulance, so he’d seen. Moss had been in France and he knew what it looked like when there was no hope. Public murder in the midst of Birmingham’s finest might have bruised the egos of the police force, but Moss was still on the payroll. He’d do what he was told.

When Polly found Ada again she was talking softly to Tommy, whose head was tilted as if he was listening for a faint sound coming from far off.

“The car’s here,” Polly said, and Tommy straightened. He glanced at Ada, a question somewhere in the lines of his face.

“Let’s get you home, Tom,” Ada said.

He stood when she did and followed her towards the door, his eyes drifting ahead of them, then narrowing. “Pol.” He stopped short in the hall before they reached the doors, searching her out as if from a long distance though she was right beside him. She hadn’t been certain he’d even known she was there. “The police…”

“Told them to fuck off. There’s nothing you can give them that the rest of us haven’t already said.”

He nodded once and turned away.

Outside Arthur hovered by the boot of the car, coming to attention as they emerged. “Alright, Tom,” he said, almost a question. His face had broken open to boyhood and Polly had a sudden memory of him, twelve years old and running hell bent for help after a pony had thrown Tommy and trampled him. Tommy’s attention slid away from Arthur, down to his shoes. Arthur swallowed whatever else he’d meant to say and opened the back door to the car. “Alright,” he repeated. “We’ll just get you home now.”

“I’ll drive myself,” Tommy said to no one in particular.

Like hell. “You’ll do no such thing.” Polly forced her tone to brook no argument. “Get in the car, Thomas.”

For a moment she thought he’d fight her but then the fight drained out of him and he did as instructed, climbing into the back seat, Ada following. Arthur shut the door and Polly gave him a tight smile.

“I’ll drive him. You go ahead home to Linda, Arthur.”

Relief and worry warred in the set of Arthur’s shoulders, but he finally nodded and bent to kiss her cheek. “You call,” he said. “Any time.”

 

It was late and the roads thankfully deserted. Polly kept one eye on the back seat, where from time to time Ada turned to Tommy with some low word that he ignored, his face turned away to the window, a pale phantom in the dark.

Halfway to Warwickshire he straightened and leaned over the front seat. “Pol, stop the car,” he ordered, the urgency jolting after the long silence. “Stop the car, now.”

Ada met her eyes in the mirror and she didn’t seem at all surprised, like she’d seen this coming, but there was dread there as well. “Tommy--”

“Stop the fucking car,” he barked, and he was reaching for the handle to his door so Polly yanked the car to the side of the road and turned around to face the back seat.

“What in the bloody hell--”

“We left him,” Tommy’s voice stumbled. “We-- we left him--”

Ada snatched at his arm before he could bolt. “Stop it, Tom.” She pinned his shoulders to the seat, nearly climbing into his lap to keep him in the car, then shook him as he tried to jerk away. “Charlie’s at the house. He’s at the house with Mary, I promise you.”

There was nothing sane in the stare he turned on her. Polly froze. Jesus. Was he armed? She couldn’t remember.

“We’re almost there, okay? We’re almost there and then you’ll see. I spoke to Mary on the phone, remember? Arthur sent John and Finn and Isiah to the house and Johnny’s there with some Lee boys. Charlie’s safe in bed. He’s safe, Tommy.”

Tommy shook his head, struggling to rein himself in, and this must have been what Ada had danced around telling her before, at the hospital. She’d been wrong about one thing, though. Arthur would have been good to have on hand if Tommy made a run for it.

“Let me go.” He’d stopped resisting her grip but his face was stripped raw, all bone and sinew. “I have to--”

“You have to go home to Charlie, and that’s what we’re doing.” Ada released him but took his hand in hers again like she had back at the hospital, and Polly saw that waves of shivers were running through both of them like doped horses after a race. “Start the car, Polly.”

Polly gave it a moment, waiting to make sure he wasn’t about to go for the door again. Tommy sank back against the seat, eyes closed, and in the streetlights she could see the outline of his skull under the skin.

By the time she pulled the car to a stop in front of the house he looked more lucid than he had since Changretta’s man had fired the shots. She didn’t trust it, this calm, but she followed Ada as Ada followed Tommy up the steps to the big front doors of Arrow House.

John met them in the hall with a rifle on his shoulder, Finn behind him. Tommy just brushed past them as if they weren’t there and Polly shook her head. “Let him go, John.”

 

“What the hell was that, in the car?” Polly demanded, once John and Finn had returned to their posts and she and Ada had both drifted automatically to the library. She poured two tumblers of whiskey from Tommy’s crystal decanter and handed one over to Ada. “I thought he was going to run us off the bloody road.” Polly took a swallow and let it burn.

Ada sank into a chair, rubbing her forehead. “At the hospital he was worried Changretta might go after Charlie, here at the house.”

*Worried* seemed like it might be underplaying things. Polly took in Ada’s dishevelment with a closer scrutiny this time, given she’d practically wrestled Tommy to stop him from jumping out of the car. “Ada, he didn’t know where Charlie was. I don’t know if he knew where *he* fucking was.”

Ada sighed. “I told you, they said it’s shock.”

Polly paced in front of the big desk, the pink silk of her dress at odds with the circumstances, completely unsuitable in a fight. “He was calm enough before we left the hospital.”

Ada clearly had opinions about that but all she said was “It comes and goes. He’ll seem himself and then... ”

Shit. Polly glanced at the door, lowered her voice. “He remembers she’s dead, right?”

“I think so.” Ada took a sip of her own drink and set it aside, slumping in her chair. The grandfather clock read three in the morning and Polly could feel every fucking hour this night had lasted. “He hasn’t-- he hasn’t said anything about her since they let him in to see the body.”

“Christ,” Polly said. “We should check on him.”

“He won’t hurt Charlie.” Ada stood all the same.

“Not what I’m worried about.” Polly swallowed the rest of her drink, weary down to her marrow. What she was worried about she refused to name, even to herself. But she didn’t know this Tommy, she didn’t know what he’d do, and that was worry enough.

They found him in the nursery, sitting on the floor in the dark with his back to the crib and Charlie a sleeping bundle against his chest, tousled head nestled in the crook of his neck. After a moment Ada pulled Polly away from the door and let it shut.

“We need to get him out of those clothes,” Polly said.

Ada nodded, but led the way back to the library.

 

Polly managed a few hours of sleep in the room she’d claimed at the wedding before she found Ada picking at a slice of toast in the servant's quarters, both of them still wearing their ridiculous evening dresses from a lack of proper alternatives, which was a problem Polly hadn’t yet taken the time to solve.  Ada dropped her crust to her plate and looked up, the smudges under her eyes testament to the night before.

“I have to pick up Karl and pack a few things, but I’ll be back.” Ada sounded reluctant to leave, like Polly hadn’t been running this family for years without her input or supervision.

Polly found a warm teapot and poured herself a cup. “And Tommy? Have you seen him?”

Ada lifted a shoulder and Polly supposed that was answer enough. “Still in the nursery, last I checked. We should send the boys home. Arthur’s rounding up replacements.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Who, Tommy?” Ada took a sip of her tea.

“I gathered you talked to bloody Arthur, so yes, Ada, Tommy.”

“I don’t think he got any sleep, but that’s to be expected.”

When had Ada become so fucking evasive? “Not what I asked you.”

“What do you want me to say, Polly?” There were lines in Ada’s face Polly didn’t remember being there the day before. “I talked to him. I talked and he didn’t talk back."

“Did Mary bring him anything--”

“Tea. You know he’s not going to eat before the funeral.”

“Fuck.” Polly let herself close her eyes, held her face in her hands. This was the tradition he’d decided to honor? “We don’t know how long the police are going to keep the body, Ada, he can’t--”

“Polly.”

She dropped her hands. “He doesn’t believe in God, why should he hold to that old--”

“It doesn’t matter why. We need to make sure he can bury her as soon as possible, and he’s not in any state to get that done himself.”

“Her people are all in fucking Ireland! It could take a week to get them here.”

“Yeah, well, they’ll have to visit her grave when they bloody can.”

“He can’t go days without eating,” Polly insisted. “And he’s still got blood all over him, hasn’t he? Someone’s got to--” Ada was fixing her with the same steady stare that used to drive her wild when she’d been a girl and her mother had aimed it her way. Her mother, who had died the year before Ada was born. “What?”

There’d been a time when Tommy and Ada had been thick as thieves, before their own mother had died and their father had left and Polly’s own children were taken from her. Before the war. When he’d come back Tommy had been a stranger to them all and Ada had drifted away to Freddie and his Bolsheviks. But whatever she’d seen at the hospital while Polly was dealing with the police, it had roused some quality in Ada that Polly wasn’t sure what to make of yet.

“Just listen to me, Aunt Pol. The two of you are more alike than you let on, you’re both battering rams when a knock would get it done. But I’m telling you, right now we need to let him come to the door in his own time.”

“Or what?”

“Or he’ll find a window. And the nearest one might not be on the ground floor.”

She'd abandoned her coat at the hotel last night in all the chaos and she found herself wishing for a shawl to wrap around her bared shoulders against the chill.

“Jesus Christ, Ada, what’s that supposed to mean?”

One of the kitchen maids slipped into the room to hover uncertainly behind Ada, a covered plate in her hands, only to flee at the glare Polly sent her way. Eavesdroppers, all of them.

Ada sighed. “You need to take care with him right now. He’s not--”

“He’s not what?” Her hackles were up, and she was too tired to smooth them down again. “What are you getting at?”

“You saw him, in the car,” Ada said finally. “At the hospital it was worse.”

“His wife was killed, of course he’s upset.” Polly took a sip of her tea, trying to settle her nerves. Last night had shaken her, yeah, but Grace had only just died. Now that he knew Charlie was safe, they needed to get him into fresh clothes and get some food into him and he’d start to recover. “As long as we keep him from going after Changretta himself, he’ll be alright.”

“Polly--”

“People die, Ada. This isn’t his first loss. Your mother, Greta Jurossi, the bloody war. He’s always landed on his feet.”

And there it was again, the look Polly’s mother used to level at her when she was about to do something particularly foolish. “Just… step lightly, okay?” Ada said. “And I’ll be back quick as I can.”

 

After Ada left Polly accepted an egg and more tea from the cook and tried to force it down so that at least one person in this godforsaken house was properly fed. Then she went looking. The door to the nursery stood open, the room deserted. The master bedroom was untouched and the fireplace cold. She retraced her steps and followed a high pitched whine to the library where she found Charlie still in Tommy’s arms, working himself into a choking wail, his round face screwed up and beet red while Tommy paced with choppy steps, knuckles pale where he gripped the baby.

He was still in the stained tuxedo shirt, jacket and tie long lost and collar hanging loose, the patch of dried blood she’d noticed at the hospital a dark mark on his chest. The cloth of his trousers was stiffened and stained all down the back of one of his thighs, where he must have been sitting in the puddle of Grace’s blood back at the ballroom before the ambulance had come.

“It’s alright, it’s alright,” Tommy was saying. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. It’s alright.” Charlie only cried harder, little fists balled. The fabric of Tommy’s voice frayed. “Please, Charlie.”

When he passed her next she reached for him. He whirled, clutching the baby, sending Charlie into a scream. He stopped short and stared at her and she waited him out while his breathing ratcheted down closer to normal. At least he hadn’t gone for the gun. If he hadn’t been armed before he was now, the straps of his holster black against the white cloth of his shirt.

“Tommy,” she said, and then words faltered. The baby struggled in his father’s grip and his screaming set her teeth on edge. She took a deep breath and tried again. “Has he been changed this morning?” Tommy just stood there like she wasn’t speaking any language he understood. “The baby’s probably wet. Let me--”

“I know how to change a diaper,” he said.

“He’s hungry, then. Let me have Mary bring you--”

“He didn’t want food.” He turned away and Polly wasn’t sure she trusted that he was talking about the baby, but she didn’t push it. Charlie’s wail went on and on and the strain in the set of Tommy’s shoulders told her he was holding him too tightly again.

“Thomas.” She waited for him to face her. He didn’t. “Tommy, you’re scaring him. Let me--”

His back stiffened and when he finally turned she took an involuntary step away. Before she could say anything more he carried Charlie past her and out of the room and all she could do was watch him go as the baby’s cries faded into the house.

  
  
Ada was back with Karl and a suitcase by noon, and Polly resented her own relief. She gave Karl a hug and sent him off to play in the nursery with Mary and waited until Ada asked before she said anything more.

“He’s out in the stables, I think. Johnny’s keeping an eye on things.” She took a moment, lit a cigarette. “You were right. I can be a bull in a china shop, I know that.”

Ada gave her a tired smile. “We’re all just doing our best, Pol. Even Tommy.”

“That’s not saying much.” Polly led them back into the kitchen, where Mary had asked the staff to lay out a cold lunch, should any of them ever care to eat again. “He won’t put the baby down, even for a second.”

“Hmm.” Ada turned a careful scrutiny on her that Polly didn’t much like. “Why don’t you go home yourself for a while, pack a bag. Get a little sleep.”

“Moss is coming by around three.”

Ada frowned. “That’s not a good idea.” As if she didn’t bloody know.

“He might work for us but he still fancies himself a proper policeman, and this was murder in front of half of fucking Birmingham. He’s not taking no for an answer.”

“Arthur’s on his way. We can handle Moss. Go home, Polly.”

Ada had changed and freshened up and next to her, still in her drooping silk from the night before, Polly felt a vagabond. So she stubbed out her cigarette and made up her mind.


	2. Chapter 2

Miracle of miracles, by the time she got back to Arrow House with her own bag -- and no sleep -- the police had only just arrived. Moss was perched uncomfortably in a chair in front of Tommy’s desk in the library, a delicate porcelain teacup in one of his blunt hands. A skinny young deputy hovered by the wall like a struck dog. Before she could greet them Tommy swept into the room behind her, Ada in his wake, Charlie asleep against his shoulder. He’d left the soiled tuxedo behind in exchange for a fresh shirt and waistcoat and dark grey pair of trousers, though his collar and watch fob were missing and he hadn’t shaved, which she supposed was too much to ask. He ignored them all as he poured himself a whiskey.

“Mr. Shelby--” Moss rose, gingerly setting the teacup down onto its saucer.

Ada sent Polly a look she couldn’t interpret and took a seat on the green couch, leaving the chair next to Moss open, so Polly accepted the unspoken direction. Tommy swallowed his drink and poured himself another before crossing to sit in his place behind the desk, settling Charlie in his lap once he did. The expression he lifted to Moss was brutal in its blankness.

Moss retook his seat, then shifted in his chair. “Mr. Shelby, we’re very sorry for the loss of your wife. I know this may be difficult, but we need to--”

“Just get on with it,” Tommy bit off.

“We have the man who shot Mrs. Shelby in custody. He’s, uh, currently in the hospital, but we have him under guard. Witnesses at the scene told us you were his intended target.”

Fuck. Polly glanced from Moss to Tommy. Tommy swallowed his second tumbler of whiskey in one go and set the glass down without a sound on the desk.

“Yes,” he said, after a long empty pause.

“And this was in retaliation for--”

“Inspector Moss,” Polly broke in. Tommy flicked her an impatient glare.

“You have the facts,” he said. “What more do you need to know?”

“Well, there’s the Duchess.” All the muscles of Tommy’s face shifted in a way that sent the small hairs on the back of Polly’s neck standing. Moss faltered, then found his voice again. “She was present at the scene. So my question is whether Mrs. Shelby’s death had anything to do with the business from your wedding night.”

Charlie squirmed in Tommy’s lap as if roused by the black pit opening up behind his father’s eyes.  

“That’s enough,” Polly snapped. “Moss, you know full fucking well this was revenge for Changretta’s son.”

A pugnacious defiance lifted Moss’s chin. “My only concern is for the welfare of the people of my city.”

“Then you have nothing about which to be concerned,” Tommy said, flat and final, “as none of this has a single thing to do with the good people of Birmingham.”

“Sure of that, are you?” Moss pushed. “So a war between the Peaky Blinders and the Changretta family doesn’t concern Birmingham?”

“There’ll be no war.” Tommy shifted Charlie enough to allow himself to light a cigarette.

“And the Russians?”

“The Russians are fools.”  With that Tommy stood, lifting Charlie back to his hip and staring down Moss, the smoke from his cigarette curling and spreading in a veil between him and the rest of the room.

For a moment Polly thought Moss would push things past the no man’s land that had opened up across the desk. But it was Ada who broke the standoff, rising from the couch behind them, implacably cordial.

“Inspector Moss, thank you for your time, but we have a funeral to plan. If there’s anything we can do to assist your investigation, my brother will surely make himself available again.”

Moss retreated from the contempt that had surfaced to twist his face. “Yes, of course.”

Ada gave him a patient smile. “Would you like more tea before you go?” Naturally Moss declined, and Ada escorted the two policemen from the room.

Tommy just stood there behind his desk, his gaze gone hollow and unfocused. It took a long time for his attention to find her when she spoke. “About the Russian business…”

He stubbed out his cigarette and said nothing, so she took it as a sign to continue.

“At the gala you disappeared for a time, then spoke to the Duchess. Is there anything I need to know?”

There was a desolate sort of betrayal seeping into his face, but she didn’t understand its source nor where it might be aimed. “No,” he said. He didn’t look up from the desk. “Nothing anyone needs to know.”

He was lying. What she didn’t know was why, beyond his habitual fucking inability to be forthcoming about anything at all. And yes, this wasn’t the time, but if there was going to be trouble better that it didn’t catch them by surprise. If he would loosen his grip on the reins long enough to hand them over even for a few days, maybe she could salvage things before they spiraled out of control in his absence.

“Thomas, if the Russians expect--”

He picked up the cut glass ashtray on his desk and hurled it across the room, where it shattered against the bookcase with a crash sharp as gunshot. Charlie flinched and let out a hoarse wail and Tommy dropped back into his chair like all his strings had been cut at once.

This time it was Polly who turned and left the room.

 

Ada ran smack into her in the sitting room outside the library, clearly startled by the breaking glass. She took one look at Polly and set her jaw.

“Why don’t you get some air. Bring the boys some tea."

“I don’t need you managing me.” Polly snapped.

“Moss said they’ll release the body tomorrow morning for the wake.” Which was another fucking attempt at distraction. Ada herded her toward the hall, away from Tommy and her repeated failure to handle him with any sort of skill. “He’ll want Jeremiah for the service.”

“He doesn’t believe! What difference does it make?” Polly knew she was careening past  the edge of her control but he’d unnerved her, his clinging to the baby, the way his voice would sound perfectly normal for short bursts while his whole being teetered on the verge of falling to ruin. “We should just get it over with and put her in the ground.”

Ada almost seemed to pity her, which was worse than bossing her around. “Polly, he has beliefs, he just doesn’t believe in God. Besides, Grace was a Protestant. And she liked Jeremiah.”

Before Polly could muster a response to that, there was a voice behind them.

“Ada?”

They turned as one to find Tommy standing just outside the doorway to the library. Ada glanced at her and took a few steps toward him, leaving him plenty of room. “Yeah, Tommy.”

Charlie was limp and inconsolable on Tommy’s shoulder, fingers stuck in his mouth. When Tommy said nothing more Ada closed the distance between them and put a hand on his arm. He stepped back out of her reach and then stopped himself as if the reaction had escaped his control, and she let her hand drop and waited him out.

“Can you--” he stopped again, like maybe words were beyond him. “Would you take him. Take him for awhile.” It wasn’t a question and it was entirely without tone.

Polly’s throat clenched, the weight of everything that had happened suddenly present in a way that it hadn’t quite been before, leaving her feeling wholly inadequate in the face of it all.  

“Of course, Tom.” Ada said.

When Tommy didn’t make any move to hand the baby over Ada approached him again, slow and careful, brushing the hair out of Charlie’s eyes. “It’s alright, love,” she said, and gathered Charlie into her arms. Tommy’s hand lingered, curled over the back of his son’s head, and then he turned before either of them could say anything more and walked out the front door.

 

Not a man had come back from France the same. There were men who went blind for no reason a doctor could find, men who refused to venture into the open air, men who went on as before for weeks or months or years before they put a bullet between their own eyes. All of them transformed by a vast machinery that Polly could only grasp through the bullshit in the papers and neighborhood gossip and reading between the lines of the letters from the front that got past the censors. It had opened up a gulf between her and the boys, one that hadn’t been there before they’d left, but John and Arthur she’d still understood all the same. They drank and fought and sank into melancholy, and then the whole cycle would start again. They could be managed.

Things had been bad with Tommy in the weeks after they shipped back to Birmingham, bad in a way she hadn’t known how to solve. He’d stepped off the train behind his brothers as insubstantial as a haunting, but even so John and Arthur were already showing him a strange, new sort of deference that didn’t entirely seem rooted in his medals and his rise through the ranks over them in the army. She’d feared at first he was like the boys who’d had their voices robbed from them by the fighting, but that wasn’t it. He’d speak when he needed to. But no more than that, and seldom looked you in the eye when he did. He wasn’t home much and no one seemed to know where he spent his time, and even as Arthur and John wove themselves back into the business, Tommy showed no interest at all.

And then before she’d worked out what to do he’d been back. Tempered like a blade and driving them all mad with his high-handedness. Before the war he’d only skirted the protection side of things but suddenly he was in the brutal thick of it, egging Arthur and John on, staging what felt like a siege of Birmingham itself until family meetings were a thing of the past and they all took orders from him like soldiers. And if sometimes that chafed, at first it had been a relief to her, his iron control. He might be aloof and overbearing and there seemed not a trace left of the sweet-tempered boy he’d been but compared to some of the sons and husbands of Small Heath, compared to Arthur even, he was able to get on with it. The war had forged a new man out of him and if that man was one she didn’t much like at times, at least he was alive and capable. And under his whip the business had taken off beyond anything any of them had ever dreamed.

But Grace… Grace had gotten to him before he’d quite finished hardening in the mold, leaving a defect behind that ran through the metal of him, one Polly hadn’t taken seriously enough before. And now that metal was failing under the stress and she couldn’t anticipate which way the cracks would run, where the pieces would fall, what would remain of the structure when they did. What it might take down with it if it completely collapsed.

She’d nearly forgotten those first few weeks after the war, overshadowed as they’d been by everything that had come after, by the sheer momentum of Tommy’s plans for them all. But that time came back to her now as she poked at the fire in her room in his grand house, halfway into a bottle of red wine from his cellar. And she was at a loss, at a complete loss how to handle him when he was like this. Back then he’d kept himself scarce. Losing himself in the city late into the night, surfacing for the occasional meal or to tend to the horses with Curly. Silent at family meetings, something absent in his eyes even when he looked at you direct. How that had shifted and why was a mystery she had never found the answer to, and no help to her now.

A knock at the door broke into her thoughts and she rose, wrapping her robe around her. Ada, pale and worn around the edges, still with that new expression Polly didn’t know if she could trust, like she’d been doing sums in her head and found the accounting wanting.

“I thought you’d want to know, I got the baby to sleep.” Ada said.

“Poor lamb.” It had been hours since Tommy handed him over. When Polly had left them, Charlie had just started crying for his mother.

“He hasn’t come back yet?” Ada seemed to already know the answer.

Polly shook her head. “Took a car. God knows where he went.” Ada had counselled giving him space but now she looked like she might be reconsidering. “Sometimes you have to force the bloody door to make sure they don’t go for the window,” Polly said. “Sometimes there are no good fucking choices.”

Ada sighed, scrubbing her eyes with one hand. “I know, Pol. But what do you suggest, tying him to a chair?”

“I’d at least get a good night’s sleep if we did.”

“He won’t leave Charlie.” Ada didn’t look as certain as she wanted to sound, more rattled now in his absence than she’d been even while keeping him bodily from escaping the car.

Polly didn’t have anything reassuring to say. Just took Ada’s face in her hands and kissed her forehead, remembering the girl who had tried to follow her brother everywhere he tramped in Small Heath, and the boy who had more often than not held her hand as she did.

 

A long while later something startled her out of her doze in front of the fire and she went to the door half disoriented by dreams only to catch Tommy in the hall, emerging from the dark of the stairs, still in his shirt and waistcoat. Just come from outside, by the cold that lingered around him. He paused and turned towards her automatically, his eyes lost to hollows she couldn’t read, and she found herself the wordless one this time as he drifted past her, heading for the nursery.

Fuck. “Tommy he’s asleep, leave him be,” she hissed after him. Whether he heard or not, he slipped into the room. She waited and a few moments later he emerged, shutting the door in silence behind him before he continued on to the master bedroom. And that was another kind of bad idea, but she wasn’t about to stop him.

Polly closed her own door and returned to her chair and after a time she could hear faint movement from next door. They’d told Mary not to light a fire, sure he’d avoid the room if he returned at all that night. There was another louder sound she couldn’t label, close enough it had to be the fireplace on the other side of the wall, and then quiet again.

The clock on the mantel above her hearth read half past midnight so it wasn’t quite as late as she’d first thought, but sleep had deserted her. She’d lost herself in circling ruminations again when a sharp smell sent her first sneezing and then coughing. There was a faint haze hanging in the air as if the chimney had backed up, but in a house like this one the chances of that happening were fucking slim, the place was kept cleaner than a surgery.

Then there was a crash from the other room and she was on her feet quicker than thought, throwing open her own door and flying to the master bedroom. The room was filling with smoke, lit only by an inferno in the fireplace, and at first she could see nothing through the dimness, nothing at all. Then there was a rough cough and she caught the darker shadow that was Tommy, back to the wall on the other side of the hearth, curling in on himself as if shot.

“Jesus,” she muttered, picking her way across the room. “Tommy--”

He turned away as she approached then bent double, wracked by another cough. There was something piled on top of the logs in the fireplace -- scorched and smoking lengths of cloth. She couldn’t quite tell what it was through the haze and the flames but there was a hint of what might have been dark lace, so it wasn’t hard to guess.

He has his beliefs, Ada had said, and Christ but he picked and chose among the ones he’d grown up with, haphazard as a magpie.

“For fuck’s sake, this isn’t the sort of thing you do inside the bloody house.”

She left him where he was and hurried into the master bath. Finding nothing to carry water with she soaked thick towels in the tub and carried the heavy pile back, dripping, to toss on the fire. It hissed and steamed, flames licking the edges, but the worst of it smothered and died and blanketed the room in darkness. In the quiet that followed she could hear Tommy gasping.

Polly stumbled towards the faint silhouette of the nearest lamp.

“Don’t--” he choked out, but she ignored him.

The lamp didn’t illuminate much of the room but it did enough. Under the towels she’d thrown on the fire she could just see what was left of the lilac dress Grace had worn on their wedding day. Tommy had turned his back on her, shoulder against the wall, still heaving like a man narrowly saved from drowning. She tried to wait him out but it just went on until she thought it might be a kindness if he’d only pass out.

“Tommy.” She rounded the fireplace until she stood in front of him. He was clutching one fist to his chest, the other hand pressed flat against the wall next to him, his hair damp and hanging into his eyes. The light was thin this far from the lamp but she could see the gleam of sweat slicking the hollow of his throat and running down his temple.

“Can you speak?” she demanded. Anything to break through the state he was in.

He shook his head.

“Do we need a doctor?”

“No,” he ground out finally.

She parted the curtains and thrust open the windows, letting in a rush of chill air. There was another lamp nearby, which she lit, and Tommy threw up a hand as if blinded. When he did something clattered to the floor and he froze in place at the sound. Polly bent and came up with the sapphire on its chain and he snatched it from her before she could do more than recognize the shape of it as it disappeared into his pocket.

At least he hadn’t thrown the damned thing into the fire.

A shudder ran through her at the wrecked mask of his face when he finally lifted his head. His eyes were open wide enough to show the whites all the way round and even in the dim light his pupils were pinpricks lost in pale sea glass.

Oh fuck.

Oh fucking hell.

“So that’s where you got off to,” she said, and he stared at her, unblinking. “Did you bring it into the house with you?”

Another harsh cough shook him. “Bring what into the house?” he echoed, voice stripped.

“You bloody well know what.”

He pushed off the wall and staggered away from her towards the master bath and she let him go. Let him shut the door and lock himself inside.

Fuck. What the hell were they going to do?


	3. Chapter 3

She didn’t know when he’d first started with the smoke because it had taken her a shameful amount of time to catch on to it at all. After he’d decided to rejoin the business he was there in the shop promptly every morning, more often than not before anyone else, and he was hard and infuriatingly competent and showed no patience for weakness of any kind in anyone.

It was Ada who’d started her doubting. “He doesn’t sleep much,” she’d told Polly one morning after Tommy had left on some errand, a couple of months in. “I hear him moving about at night.”

Polly hadn’t known what Ada was driving at and said so, to which Ada just gave her a look like she thought Polly had fallen behind the conversation. “It’s just that he doesn’t talk to anyone anymore. And he goes off in the middle of the night sometimes, and sometimes he doesn’t come back until morning. And he’s… different.”

“They’re all different,” Polly had said.

“I know. But there’s something else, Aunt Pol.” But Ada didn’t have a guess what that could be and so her worry seemed unfounded in the face of the machine Tommy had become.

And frankly Polly forgot about it, too busy keeping him from taking over the bloody world too quickly for the rest of them to keep up. But sometimes in the mornings he’d be distant and impassive and he’d only take tea and sometimes if they got stuck in the shop too late at night he got edgy, a restlessness creeping under his skin until he was snapping at everyone, even Finn.

Still she didn’t suspect anything was amiss until one morning he didn’t come down to the shop at all.

“He says he’s sick,” Finn had chirped.

John lifted his shoulder in a shrug. “Flu’s still going round.”

One of the irritating things about Tommy was he rarely got ill, even as a child, even  when the rest of them had been cut down by whatever was going around the neighborhood. Though the worst of the plague that had struck at the end of the war had passed, the flu continued to reap the young and strong, so she climbed the stairs to his bedroom. And found him curled in a ball in his bed, pale and shivering under the blankets.  

“Christ,” she’d said. “I never thought I’d see the day.”

She bent over him and he flinched away from her touch, teeth chattering, and instead of the fever she expected to find he was soaked to the bone but chilled. As she watched his body clenched in a spasm, his eyes pressed shut with it, and then he gripped her wrist with one hand.

“Pol--”

She knew the look and grabbed his washbasin, just making it back to the bed in time for him to grasp it in both hands and gag, but he brought up nothing more than a little water and bile before collapsing back to the mattress.

“Well, it’s probably not the flu,” she said after he settled, panting a little, as miserable as she’d ever seen him. “I suppose that’s a relief. Where did you eat last night?”

He just shook his head.

“Alright. I’ll get you some water.”

“The odds--” he forced out around another spasm.

“Contrary to your belief, Tommy Shelby, the fucking races will go on without you. I’ll bring you some toast in a bit and see if you can keep it down.”

But he couldn’t keep down water or tea and after the second time she checked in on him he’d locked her out.

“Food poisoning,” she diagnosed when Arthur asked after him that afternoon, but Arthur didn’t laugh it off like she expected. Instead he frowned, puzzled.

“He didn’t eat anything yesterday, Pol. Said he wasn’t hungry. You know how he is.”

“A stomach bug then,” she concluded.

She was still at the kitchen table going over the books when he descended the stairs, well after dark had fallen and Arthur and John had headed to the Garrison for a drink. Shaky and pale, his eyes sunken, he stopped short when he saw her like she’d caught him out.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she’d demanded. He’d pulled his long coat on over his undershirt and trousers, his rolled cap sticking out of one pocket.

“Nowhere,” he’d said, and walked past her out the door.

So she’d waited up, waited past the time Arthur stumbled back and went to bed. And when Tommy did finally turn up it was nearly two and the sound at the door startled her out of a sound sleep. And the first thing he did when he saw her was laugh. It was short and harsh but amused all the same.

“What’re you still doing up, eh?” he’d asked, incredulous, like he couldn’t possibly think of a reason.

She blinked at him, thrown. The shivering mess from the morning was gone like it had never been. He stood there straight and at ease in the dim light, a little color in his cheeks even, only the bruising under his eyes remaining from his illness.

“So you’re feeling better, then?”

The smile that had surfaced faded and he looked away. “It’s late. Go to bed, Pol.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You were sick as a dog five hours ago.”

“Yeah,” he lifted his chin, almost a challenge, the opaque blue of his eyes reflecting nothing back to her. “Well now I’m not. Good night.”

She’d watched him go, her own stomach quaking as she put the pieces together. Tommy of course had been fine in the morning, dressed and shaved and in the shop by seven.

It had taken some subtle probing but in the end it turned out that of all of them, John had known all along. “You can’t say nothing,” he’d insisted, nearly wringing his hands after she’d gotten him to crack. “He doesn’t know I know. You didn’t see him before we got back. He was alright until the fighting stopped and then… it was bad, Aunt Pol. Me and Arthur, we weren’t sure, we weren’t sure he’d hold up. But he pulled it together on the train home and he’s fine now.”

Polly had absorbed that, unable to imagine what John’s definition of bad could be, too many options to choose from, too many stories of horror. “Fine? You’re telling me he’s smoking fucking opium, John. That’s not fine.”

John, who was rarely serious or fully sober himself in those days, had straightened and shot her an old man’s stern rebuke. “The smoke’s better than him putting his fucking gun in his fucking mouth.”

And Jesus Christ but what was she supposed to say to that? So she’d let it go, but after that she’d caught on to the signs.

Some weeks were worse than others and she’d learnt to tell when he’d had a bad night from the way he seemed blurred the next morning like you were looking at him through rain running down glass. He’d be a beat slower than usual but he concealed it so well she had to forgive herself for not noticing sooner. Because it was all so unlike him. Nothing like the man he’d been before of course, but also leagues away from the face he showed them in the daytime, so controlled and precise and relentless, that if she hadn’t had confirmation from John she would have doubted her own conclusions.

Then the trap that was Grace had sprung and after that betrayal and Danny Whizz Bang’s death Polly had been afraid he’d chase the rabbit down its hole. Instead he announced he was going to London and they’d all taken the piss out of him for the unexplained holiday and when he got back a week later the pipe he’d thought hidden was gone from his room when she checked. Which didn’t mean anything, she knew, but there hadn’t been any other signs of the smoke either. Not in four years.

Four bloody years.

 

She called Mary and had the maids woken to tidy the room and haul away the scorched rags from the fireplace and after they’d left she knocked on the door to the master bath then used the key Mary had given her when there was no answer.

Only to find him on the floor, slumped boneless against the side of the tub, drained of all color. Her breath ripped from her as she fell to her knees next to his sprawled legs.

“Tommy! Fuck, Tommy--” He didn’t rouse at her shout nor when she shook his shoulder and Mother of God she wasn’t sure he was breathing. It took too long but her fingers found a lethargic pulse at his throat and when she stilled herself with one hand flat on his chest she could feel him inhale finally, breaths so shallow and far apart it spurred her own already racing heart into a gallop.

“Fuck, Thomas. Oh Jesus,” she whispered, running a hand across his forehead and cheek. When she thumbed open one of his eyelids empty blue had swallowed his pupil, worse than it had been out in the room when he’d faced her before. The fucking pipe lay in his lax hands, his lighter and a little metal box abandoned on the floor at his thigh, and the faint dusty sweetness of the smoke still lingered in the air.

She didn’t want to leave him but he was too heavy for her to move on her own and before she’d made up her mind quite what to do she was in Ada’s room, shaking her from sleep.

“Polly, what--” Ada peered up at her blearily from the bed.

“It’s Tommy, Ada.” And Ada followed her out of the room without asking anything more.

Tommy hadn’t moved from where he’d passed out on the floor. Ada froze in the doorway of the bath, her hand at her mouth. “What happened, what’s wrong--”

Polly had forgotten that Ada might not know about the smoke. “Opium. I think he’s had too much, I can’t wake him.”

“Opium?” Ada shook her head. “Pol, are you sure it’s not just whiskey--”

Polly held up the pipe. “Do you see a bloody bottle here?”

“How--”

“It started after France. Ada, help me get him up.”

But Ada just stood there, gaping. “All this time?”

“He stopped years ago as far as I know.” Polly crouched down next to Tommy, checking his pulse again. “Now, Ada.”

Ada moved to his other side and they got their arms around his back and heaved his dead weight between them, sliding him up the wall next to the tub, and when they took a step forward his head lolled back, exposing his throat at an angle that sent cold fingers down Polly’s spine because he wasn’t aware at all, was he, to look like that. Bullet wounds and stabbings and broken bones she knew how to treat, but she didn’t know anything about this, didn’t know what to do but get him out of here and onto the bed.

Wordlessly they hefted him, wedging their shoulders under his arms and half dragging him out into the bedroom, his head rolling forward loosely to his chest. Polly would rather he wake -- if he ever did again -- in another room than this but there was no way they were going to be able to move him that far themselves.

Halfway to the bed he made a low confused sound and pulled weakly against their grip. His feet suddenly engaged with the floor on their own, tripping them up, and they nearly dropped him.

“Tommy?” His head lifted from his chest a little at her voice, his eyelids fluttering. “Thomas Shelby, wake the fuck up, right now.”

He slurred a sound she couldn’t make out, squinting up at her.

“That’s it. Open your fucking eyes,” she ordered.

“Pol…” he breathed.

“Yeah, it’s me. Can you walk?”

It took him a long moment, as if he didn’t understand what she wanted from him, but then the weight on their shoulders lifted a little and he lurched forward a step, then another. Polly made a decision. “Ada, turn around. We’re going to my room.”

Ada looked like she thought that plan was doomed to failure but she didn’t argue. What otherwise would have taken a few short minutes took them a quarter hour of struggle, Tommy drifting in and out of focus, losing his footing and falling first into her and then Ada in turn. It seemed an impossible task but get him there they did, at least as far as one of the chairs by the fire. By that point none of them were capable of speech. Ada collapsed to the floor, her face in her hands, and Polly just stood over him, waiting to catch her breath.

Now that the worst of the danger had passed a rush of fury took her, words spilling out hot before she could stop them. “If you want to off yourself do the job right and use a fucking gun.”

Tommy lifted his head, eyes heavy lidded and more exposed than she’d ever seen him, stripped down to the rafters. Ada dropped her hands, got to her feet, and yanked Polly from the room, shutting the door behind them.

“His wife was murdered in front of him yesterday,” Ada demanded. “Did you forget?”

Exhaustion swept over Polly, driving the anger away, a chill wash of shame following in its wake. She’d lost control and she knew it. “I thought he was dead, Ada. When I first found him I thought he was fucking dead.”

When she touched her face her fingers came away wet. Ada just wrapped her in her arms and held her as she cried.

“I’m no good with him,” she said into Ada’s shoulder once the tears had dried up. “I know that. But Ada--”

“Alright, Pol. I’ll stay with him, okay? Take my room.” It wasn’t a suggestion but it was said with care and Polly was too wrung out to argue.

“Keep him awake if you can,” she said. “At least for a couple more hours.”

Ada gave her another hug and disappeared back into the bedroom where they’d left Tommy. Polly just stood there for a long time, letting another wave of tears have their way, before retracing her steps back to the master bath and gathering up the pipe and the opium to carry to Ada’s room, where she threw them both into the bloody fire.

  
  
Six months before her children were taken from her Polly had woken to a crash and the sound of fists on flesh and her first thought had been that they were being robbed. She’d grabbed the shotgun she’d kept under her bed since her husband had died and rushed down the stairs in her nightgown to find two figures grappling in the dim light of the landing between the kitchen and the shop. She’d shouldered the gun but before she could get out a shout the larger figure got in a couple of vicious jabs that dropped the other into a limp pile on the floor and straightened, eyes wide when he faced her, hands going up.

“Whoa, whoa Pollyanna,” her brother said, and she lowered the gun on a huff of air.

“Arthur, for fuck’s sake, what’s--”

“Go on back upstairs now, I’ll handle this.” So they were being robbed, she’d thought. Some foolish neighborhood kid on his own by the looks of things. It happened sometimes, more frequently since her father passed, since Arthur had given up what little pretense he’d had of caring about the business.

The pile of rags on the floor shifted and Arthur kicked it in the head and it went still.

“Back to bed with you,” he insisted. “There’s no danger.”

“Alright. Just don’t kill the fucker, we don’t need the coppers on us.”

Arthur had laughed his cynical laugh and tipped the hat he wasn’t wearing and said “Don’t you worry about that, my dear. Go on before the whole house wakes.”

And she had, damn her. He’d always been a useless bastard, Arthur, but he was her brother. Her blood was up and she couldn’t get back to sleep and after an hour of silence she’d decided she might as well make herself some tea and take a look at the books. So she’d thrown on her robe and descended back down the stairs for the kitchen, lamp in hand.

There was still blood on the floor boards from their would-be robber. She’d sighed at the inability of men to ever fucking clean up after themselves and that’s when she’d noticed the door of the safe stood open. And the handful of bills scattered on the floor nearby and the coins under her feet and the nothing at all in the safe.

Nothing at all in the bloody safe.

“Arthur?” she’d called, gone cold. He’d stopped the thief, hadn’t he? She hadn’t heard anything but maybe there’d been more men, waiting, who’d overpowered him and--

“He’s gone,” someone said from across the shop.

She’d turned, lamp raised, cursing herself for leaving the gun upstairs, but it was only Tommy.

“Did he wake you?” she’d asked.

“Yes.” Tommy was braced against the doorway between the front parlor and the shop proper and fuck but there was blood all over his face, running into his eyes, running down his neck to soak into his collar.

“Jesus. He said it was handled. Was there more than one? What the hell happened--”

Tommy stumbled forward to pull out a chair at one of the betting tables. He sank into it and his head dropped into his hands and he didn’t say anything more.

“Thomas--”

“I couldn’t stop him,” Tommy said to the table, muffled by his hands.

“Who? What happened to your father?”

Tommy raised his head and he may have been twenty but his eyes were those of a shocked child and his voice, when he spoke again, was bleak. “He left, Aunt Pol.”

Which was how she found out her brother had been the one to rob them.

As much as it had hurt, her husband’s death hadn’t been what you could call a shock. Her father five years before, though, had been a blow. He’d been the first Shelby to settle in Small Heath and the first to build up the business, wrenching it into shape piece by piece from a one-man operation out of their parlor when she was a child. By the time she’d married he’d bought the houses on either side and knocked down the walls to set up the shop and hired ten good, hungry young men, including Scudboat and Lovelock. He’d had no qualms about teaching his daughter everything he knew about bookmaking, either, especially when it became obvious his son was less than reliable, let alone interested.

For the first couple years after her father died she managed to keep it together. Arthur was still around and occasionally contributing and just as occasionally fucking things up, but the difference it made was something she’d have dismissed until he left for good. He had enough pride then not to let his own children starve at least, even if looking after the young ones after his wife died mostly fell to Polly -- with her own two and the entire business on her shoulders, and to Tommy, still half child himself, even if he’d have disputed the notion. Arthur Jr. meant well but though he lacked the meanness he’d had his father’s inconsistencies even then, before the war, and no head for either numbers or children.

Tommy had abandoned schooling at fourteen to help fill the void left by his grandfather and Arthur Jr., bless him, had tried, but mostly Polly ran things, Anna and Michael playing at her feet while she managed the books and worked to keep the best of her father’s men from being tempted away by Changretta or Billy Kimber. And they’d held on even as they lost clients to the other bookmakers.

But now they had nothing to pay the bookies or even the runners. Now they were ruined.

“We can’t tell anyone,” Tommy said after she’d cleaned up the blood and checked him over. His father had broken a couple of his ribs and one of his fingers and he didn’t know how long he’d been out after the kick to the head but his pupils were even, at least. “If word gets out that we were taken by our own--”

“What about your brother?”

Tommy swallowed. He was breathing shallowly around the ribs and the nausea from his head and he’d refused whiskey, but his voice was steady, the child gone. “Dad will have left Birmingham by now. If we tell Arthur he’ll try to go after him and we’ll need him here.”

“Thomas, he has to know. If your father comes back--”

“You really think he’ll come back, after this?” Tommy had said, and that had been the end of it.

So they hadn’t told Arthur who’d turned them over. Because for all he was barely twenty and still preferred the stables to the shop, Polly had known Tommy was right. Arthur would have gone after his father and crumpled under the betrayal and they had nothing to pay any of their men with and no one else left of age now that their mother had passed and so they were going to need him.

To make up for the lost funds the boys expanded their occasional petty theft into outright robbery and protection. Lovelock and Scudboat had stayed, still loyal to the Shelby name after years under the patriarch’s wing, and been happy enough to go along with the new business, none of which had been foreign to their experience. John had stepped up from running errands to learning the trade and Tommy and Polly between them had made sure Ada could stay in school. And in six months they’d nearly recovered, enough to pay a few men again and keep up with a small crowd of regulars from the neighborhood.

Of course that’s when everything had gone to shit.


	4. Chapter 4

“The wake’s today,” Ada said, neatly intercepting Polly before she could even start to look for Tommy the next morning. “Arthur and John will go with you to pick up the body.”

After last night she was certain a wake was a terrible idea, but Polly kept her counsel to herself and accepted the errand as penance. “I assume he still hasn’t eaten. Did he sleep at all?”

Ada hesitated, as if even discussing him with Polly was off limits now. She’d appointed herself Tommy’s guard dog and as much as it stung Polly couldn’t fault her for it. “It was hard to tell if it was sleep or…” she frowned like she still didn’t quite believe her brother was capable of smoking opium, let alone enough to nearly kill him. “He was out for a bit. Not long enough.”

Polly didn’t ask after Ada herself, her lack of sleep was obvious. Then there was just time for breakfast before Arthur and John arrived and whisked her off to buy a casket and retrieve Tommy’s wife from the morgue.

His guardian must have misjudged the time because when they returned to the house Polly walked right into the library and came up short when confronted with Tommy himself, buried behind piles of papers and a big ledger at his desk, a pen in his hand. Charlie was sitting on a blanket on the floor a few feet away, stacking blocks with his clumsy baby fists and humming to himself tunelessly. Tommy didn’t look up and Polly was still speechless with uncertainty when behind her Mary entered the room, carrying a tray of tea.

“Oh, Mrs. Gray, I didn’t realize you’d returned.” Mary always had an air of faint disapproval about her that Polly found in turns amusing and irritating, as if they were constantly stomping all over the invisible rules of household propriety.

Tommy ignored them. It was only half ten but the decanter of whiskey and a glass sat at his elbow and he’d already filled an ashtray with stubbed out cigarettes. He was colorless in the morning light and despite the fact that he was fully and impeccably dressed and shaved, had the air of a building that had begun to collapse and been shored up too hastily, leaving the integrity of the structure uncertain.

Polly took the tray from Mary and dismissed her, then crossed to the desk and set the tray down. Poured him out a cup of tea and then set the cup and saucer in front of him, the closest she knew how to come to a peace offering. If whiskey and cigarettes -- and opium -- were allowed in this fast, he could bloody well drink some tea. She managed to keep that to herself. Just.

“You made me a pot every morning,” she said finally, when he didn’t look up but it was clear he was just staring at the neat columns of numbers written in the ledger without seeing them. “Do you remember?”

He stirred. Picked up the teacup from its saucer and sipped. “Yes.”

“Made me toast and broth.”

There was a long, long silence. He set the teacup back down with too much care. “You knew they were still alive.”

She took a seat in one of the chairs across from him. “Your father had run off and Ada and John were still kids. Finn just a baby. That was a hard time, I didn’t think we’d get through it.”

She was half afraid he’d throw something again but this morning he seemed to lack the spark. “They were still alive,” he repeated.

“After they were taken, I didn’t want to be,” she said. “And you were the one who wouldn’t let me give in to it.”

“I didn’t know any better,” he said to the ledger. There was no shape to his voice.

“Your son is alive, and safe,” she said. “Here. In this house with you.”

He set his pen down and lifted the teacup again and held it between the fingers of both hands, hardly seeming to breathe. “It’s too much of a burden to place on a child.”

“And losing both his parents in a matter of days?” She kept her words quiet and even and controlled. “What kind of burden would that be?”

When he finally met her eyes she could see that this thought was the only thing keeping him where he was and that he might have even resented that fact had the love not been stronger. And that this too was a wound that hadn’t been staunched.

He didn’t ask after the opium but she knew too well he could get more whenever he chose and that was just something she was going to have to accept. Acceptance wasn’t her strong suit. So she left him with his tea and his whiskey and his cigarettes and his baby son and went to find his guard dog before she could fuck up any further than she had the night before.

 

It was all so bloody traditional for a man who’d abandoned God.

Ada directed John and Arthur to carry the casket into the drawing room outside the dining hall, where Tommy wouldn’t accidentally stumble across it, but then Tommy appeared anyhow and told them he wanted to prepare the body himself and they’d all stood there staring at him, leaving it up to Polly to object. But she hadn’t. Maybe she should have but she didn’t have it in her to push him any farther than she had already done.

Instead she settled behind his desk in the library and made calls from a list Ada had started on the day before and hadn’t finished. Grace might have only been Mrs. Shelby officially for a matter of weeks but she’d lived here for a year before that and she’d made all manner of friends and acquaintances among Birmingham’s social scene who might want to pay their respects. Her uncle in Ireland thanked Polly coldly for the invitation she’d known he wouldn’t have time to accept but the grief behind it was genuine enough. He didn’t ask after the widower.

After that she conferred with Mary to confirm refreshments and service for the wake and when she found Ada again it was in the hall, carrying an elegant suit, one Polly  recognised from pictures of Tommy and Grace in New York.

“It’s usually women’s work, this,” Polly said, gesturing to the room where she could just see Tommy bent over the casket.

“He needed to…” Ada trailed off. “He knows what to do.” As if that was the question.

After they were finished Mary decked the room with vases of Grace’s favorite flowers and Polly thanked whatever saint watched over atheists that Tommy had dressed properly for company that morning despite the night he’d had, because it became clear he had no intention of leaving the room where Grace lay before the guests started to arrive. She supposed she should be relieved he was taking the vigil in hand himself the way he did everything else. It solved the question of how to make sure he was never left alone.

Jeremiah was the first to arrive and at the sight of him some internal structure in Tommy buckled so Polly kept everyone away from the room while they spoke, Jeremiah’s hand gentle on Tommy’s shoulder. After that came John and Esme and Arthur and Linda and Johnny and Lizzie and Finn, and between them they managed to get a few more cups of strong tea into Tommy and that seemed to allow something impenetrable and terrifyingly functional to take him over. As the guests started to trickle in she and Ada eyed this change with wary suspicion but John and Arthur took it in stride.

“That’s how it always was,” Arthur said with admiration, as they watched Tommy greet the Lord Mayor of Birmingham, accepting his condolences as if they were directed at some other man about some other tragedy.

“You mean in France?” she asked, and Arthur nodded. “How long could he sustain it?”

Arthur shrugged. “As long as there was fighting.”

It wasn’t reassuring, that. “What happened when the fighting stopped?”

“I dunno,” Arthur said. “It never really did.”

He didn’t mention whatever had happened after the armistice that had spooked John into thinking opium was an acceptable trade off, and she didn’t ask.

By three the house was full of people and Tommy had switched from tea back to whiskey, though you couldn’t tell to look at him. Ada and Polly had already intercepted two ladies wanting to ask Tommy about how his plans for the school were affected by the death of his wife, and some local tycoon who had questions about the export of car parts, which might well have been code for rum for all Polly knew. She was attempting, poorly, to make small talk with the wife of a barrister when a tall man of the cloth joined them, greeting the other woman with an easy familiarity that he then turned on Polly herself.

“The last time Mrs. Sutton -- Lucy, it’s alright if I call you Lucy, my dear, isn’t it -- had me to her table was such a blessing for a humble man of God, let me tell you, Mrs. Gray.”

Polly had never met this man in her life and there hadn’t been any clergy on Ada’s list.

The priest smiled at whatever expression had shown itself despite her wishes. “Perhaps Mr. Shelby didn’t tell you. I’m to have an office at his school, to serve the spiritual needs of the little ones.”

Polly allowed herself to blink at this. “Really.” She glanced over at Tommy only to find him glaring at the back of the priest’s slick head, a shocked revulsion writhing beneath his polite society mask. Fuck. Who was this man?

“Such a tragedy. I never had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Shelby herself, God rest her soul.”

“And yet you were going to preach at the school she was building?” Polly smiled, sweetly. “I only mention this because I know Mrs. Shelby hand-picked every person hired for the staff.”

Mrs. Sutton -- Lucy -- made a flustered, unmoored gesture, patting her hair like perhaps smoothing it into place would restore the conversation to the comfortable nonsense befitting her station.

“I wouldn’t know about that, I’m afraid. My arrangement was with Mr. Shelby himself.”

Polly had thought Tommy might join them, but instead he was still standing next to Grace’s casket as if to defend it from attack, his knuckles white where he gripped his glass. Polly didn’t know if he was armed but suddenly wished for a gun herself. She caught Ada’s eye from across the room and deliberately looked to Tommy, and when Ada took in his frozen stance she started to make her way through the clusters of people towards him.

The priest was still speaking. “And how is the baby holding up to the loss of his mother?”

“Oh the poor sweet boy,” Mrs. Sutton chimed in, relieved to be back on familiar ground. “How he must miss her.”

“Indeed,” Polly said. Ada had reached Tommy and had put herself between him and his view of the priest. Polly wasn’t sure whether that would defuse the matter or set him off, but it was out of her hands for the moment.

“Small children are dearest to me, and helping them through life’s challenges is the most rewarding aspect of my calling. I suppose Charles is still a bit too young to understand the salve the Church can bring to grief, but it’s never too early, I find--”

“Given his father believes God to be a fantasy cooked up by mankind to excuse our failings, I doubt your counsel will be required,” Polly said.

Mrs. Sutton blanched. The priest merely bestowed Polly with a benevolent half smile. “Nevertheless, please do extend to Mr. Shelby my offer to minister to his son, Mrs. Gray. And assure him that after a decent interval I will be in touch with regards to my position at his school.”

With that the priest departed, heading away from Tommy towards the front door, sprinkling greetings throughout the room as he passed, making his position among Birmingham’s elite known. She hadn’t caught his name. Who was this snake? Not an imposter to the church, clearly, but what was he to Tommy?

Polly made her apologies and left Mrs. Sutton behind. By the time she reached the casket Ada had conjured up Jeremiah and Isiah and John, who between them were discreetly blocking Tommy from the rest of the room. Tommy himself was braced against the panel wall, nodding at Ada distractedly as she spoke to him, one hand beneath his jacket on the side he kept his weapon holstered.

Fuck.

“Put that away,” Polly ordered. Tommy’s attention darted from Ada to her and then past his bodyguards. “He’s left, Thomas. There’s no need for guns.”

When Tommy just scanned the crowd again, searching, Polly turned to John. “That priest, did you see him?” At John’s nod, she continued. “Make sure he’s gone. If he’s still here, send him on his way. Politely.” John didn’t question, just slipped away, grabbing Johnny from nearby as he went.

Then, to Tommy: “Do I need to remind you the whole of fancy fucking Birmingham is here to pay respects to your wife?”

Tommy’s eyes finally settled on her. His hand fell from his holster. “I promised there’d be no guns in the house,” he said suddenly, the words tumbling from him as if dropped, and then his face twisted with such bitterness Polly had to look away. No one asked who he’d made this ridiculous promise to and after a moment Tommy spoke again. “Where’s Charlie?”

“I told you. Esme’s still got him,” Ada answered with a strain born of repetition and worry. “Just over there, with Linda and Arthur.”

“That priest. Who was he?” Polly asked when she was sure Tommy wasn’t about to bolt towards his son. “He knew me. Knew Charlie. Said he was connected to the school. What does he want, showing up here like this?”

Ada looked like she wasn’t sure whether she should wait for his answer or hustle Polly away. “He was at the gala,” she offered reluctantly. “With an MP.”

“He’s no one,” Tommy said, and it was clearly another lie but it was spoken with a bone-deep exhaustion he couldn’t, or didn’t bother, to hide.

So she let it go. For now.  
  


It was nearly seven by the time Polly was sure the last guest was gone, leaving only family in the house. Half of those who had shown up to pay their respects had instead been there to gawk at the gangster-made-good in his moment of lurid tragedy and keeping those fuckers away from Tommy had been a full time job. Linda of all people had turned out to be an unexpected asset in that department; she might not like Tommy much but she loathed the condescension of the sightseers from Birmingham’s elite more, and had a talent for sweetly diverting the worst culprits by boring them to death with talk about the Quaker missions. She and Arthur were now picking over the food Mary had set out in the dining room, Lizzie and Ada and Karl with them. John and Esme had left for home and their kids and Finn and Isiah were out with Johnny and his family and for the first time since the gala she had a moment alone with her own son.

“How’s he doing?” Michael asked lowly, nodding across the room to where Tommy was sitting, Jeremiah on one side of him and Curly and Charlie Strong on the other flank, Charlie with the baby balanced on his skinny knees. Tommy wasn’t paying them any mind, his gaze lost in the distance and his head tilted to the side as it had been at the hospital, like he was straining to hear a whisper from across a crowded room. They let him be, keeping up a meaningless chatter between them. Every so often Jeremiah would put a hand on Tommy’s arm as if to anchor him, and to her surprise Tommy didn’t pull away but would briefly focus and give Jeremiah a nod.

“Well, he hasn’t shot anyone,” Polly answered. “Yet.”

“Mum, we need to talk about how things are going to run at the company,” Michael said. “A few days is one thing but--”

“I know,” she sighed. “We’re going to have to muddle through without him for a bit.”

“Muddle through? He’s the only one who knows what’s going on half the time, and that’s not even touching the other business. The stuff I’m not supposed to know about.”

Polly turned to him. “It’s past time you stepped up, Michael. You know the legitimate business well enough and anything you and Lizzie can’t handle, you bring to me. After the funeral we’re going to give him a few more days.”

“And the other business? I was under the impression the... clients aren’t much for waiting around.”

“Arthur knows some of it.” How much, she wasn’t entirely sure. She and Arthur were going to have words. Michael raised a dubious brow. “The other business is none of your concern,” Polly finished.

Across the room, Tommy and his three companions had risen. Tommy tolerated an embrace from Curly and took Charlie back from his uncle.

“I didn’t know what to say to him,” Michael frowned. “He’s…”

“Not himself,” Polly said. “That’s to be expected. If I know Tommy, things will get back to normal soon enough.”

Michael shot her that doubtful look again and went off to take Tommy’s leave. And she found herself face to dour face with Charlie Strong. She and Charlie had never been what you could call close; Charlie had always kept to himself.

“I told you once I’d kill that brother of yours if he laid a hand on my sister’s children again,” Charlie said. Polly stared at him, thrown. Charlie nodded towards Tommy. “That one always seemed to be getting in the way of his fists. I’d find him in the stables afterwards, clean him up.”

“Does this trip down memory lane have a destination?”

“Is there anything left, d’you think, of that boy?” It was almost wistful, that, and seemed a serious question worth a serious answer, but Polly wasn’t sure what kind of answer he  wanted. The changes in Tommy after France had seemed to trouble Charlie more deeply than anyone else and they’d grown distant in the years since, yet Tommy’s son still bore his name.

“You mean the boy who put himself in front of his mother and the other children when his father was out for blood?” Charlie looked away at that and she softened at the unexpected guilt she’d roused. “He’ll never raise a hand to his child, even when he should. And he has you to thank for that, doesn’t he? That’s certainly not through my influence. Or his mother’s.”

And fuck if Charlie Strong was going to get weepy on her. Polly didn’t think she could handle that.

“D’you know, I thought he’d married for money,” Charlie said. It came out like a confession.

Polly raised a brow. “Money? If it had been about money he’d have wed that horse trainer he was fucking. No, it wasn’t about the bloody money. Might have been better if it had.”

“You disapproved of the match,” Charlie probed. “So I thought you had the same suspicion.”

“Any opinions I had on the matter weren’t about money,” she said shortly.

Before either of them could say more on the topic of the late Mrs. Shelby or the ill-fated marriage, Curly was there, hovering with his hat in his hands in the way he got when he was nervous. “She says it’s time to go, Charlie.”

“Who says--” Charlie caught himself when Curly’s agitation started to climb and shook his head. “Alright, Curly.”

“Time to go now. It’s a long drive.”

Charlie turned back to her. “He sat up with his mother, you’ll remember. You and Ada will be here tonight?”

She assured him they would and saw them to the door, Lizzie and Jeremiah following close behind. When she returned to the drawing room Arthur was thumping Tommy’s arm in his awkward way, his expression raw, Linda and Ada looking on.

“If you want us to stay, Tom, just say the word.”

Tommy shook his head. “You go ahead home, yeah?”

Arthur ruffled Charlie’s hair and wrapped Ada in a hug and when he saw Polly, gave her a kiss on the cheek.

“Tomorrow, then,” he said, and took Linda by the arm.

“Where’s Michael?” she asked after they’d left.

Ada gave her a tired grin. “Had an urgent appointment with a girl back in Birmingham, I suspect.”

Tommy had already drifted away, back towards the casket.

“C’mon, Pol,” Ada said, eyeing Tommy. “Time you sat down and had some real food yourself.”

Polly took the hint.


	5. Chapter 5

“That’s not mum,” Tommy was saying to Charlie, “that’s just what’s left.” They were standing over the casket, Charlie still on Tommy’s hip. Charlie pointed at the body and said something in the garbled baby talk only parents could decipher at that age and Tommy shook his head. “No, she’s not sleeping.”

Polly had paused in the doorway from the dining hall when she’d heard him talking to Charlie, feeling like an intruder. When both father and son lapsed back into silence she stepped forward to join them. 

“He’s too young to understand. Maybe that’s a blessing.” 

From the way Tommy’s face closed off it had been the wrong thing to say. 

It didn’t look like Grace was sleeping, it never looked like they were sleeping. She’d been a pretty one, Grace, but now she was an inert thing, waxen against the dark green satin that lined the casket. Tommy or Ada had pinned the blonde waves of her hair back from her face and done a passably natural job with powder and lipstick but nothing could hide the sunkenness of death. 

Charlie patted at Tommy’s cheek with one little hand and Tommy closed his eyes. He’d sat up with his mother’s body all night, as his uncle had reminded her, and from every indication planned to do the same for his wife. This she understood. But surely a vigil didn’t require his personal attention the entire time.

“I’ll stay with her if you want to put him to bed,” she offered. He shook his head and she sighed. “He’s a baby, Tommy, he can’t sit a vigil.”

As if in league with her, Charlie fisted his eyes, head loose in the way babies got when they were tired of holding it up. Before she could argue further or offer to take Charlie herself, Ada appeared with Karl.

“Say goodnight to your auntie, Karl,” Ada said. 

While Karl was giving Polly’s knees a clumsy hug, Tommy handed Charlie over to Ada. Polly felt herself flush, a hollow pain in her chest, but she just bent to hug Karl back and  then rose, his hand still in hers. “How about a story?” she asked him, and Karl gave her a sleepy grin. “I’ll take him,” she said to Ada, and led Karl from the room.

Karl didn’t have any questions about his dead aunt and Polly counted herself lucky. He went down easily enough and she lingered as he melted into the pillows, smoothing back his hair. He had his father’s copper brown hair and his mother’s round cheeks, and with Ada in London he seemed to have grown in leaps every time she saw him. Soon enough he’d be in school.

Polly rarely let herself dwell on what they’d all lost, but in quiet moments, watching a child slip into sleep, it was hard to keep those thoughts away. The past fifteen years had sometimes felt like a series of unrelenting robberies, whether through accident or illness or violence or abandonment or outright kidnapping. And there’d been the less tangible losses the war had brought, even as her nephews had been miraculously returned to her, mostly whole, and her son spared by youth.

Not one of them had been neglected by tragedy and though they all tended to divide time now into before and after the war, there had never been a season without pain. The year before the war sometimes lingered in her mind with a golden sort of innocence, but it had been nothing of the sort. Tommy had lost his fiance and when she was honest Polly could trace some of the changes in him that had so shocked them all after the fighting to the time before they’d even left. Tommy of all the boys in Small Heath had cared least about England and the King and the glory of battle; but when John and Arthur enlisted, he went with them all the same, and in the wake of Greta’s death some part of Polly had worried he didn’t intend to come back.

She’d only just begun to feel like things were on the up when war had broken out, stripping her of her nephews five years after her children had been taken from her. Ada had tried to step in to help in the shop but she hadn’t been privy to much of the business before the boys left and though she tried in her way she couldn’t fill their shoes. And Polly wasn’t a patient teacher, finding herself constantly holding Ada up to a standard set by Tommy, which had hardly been fair. Though she’d pitched in around the house after her mother died Ada had still been free to remain ignorant of the business in a way that Tommy had never been afforded. He’d been working for the family since he was a kid, first as a runner, then learning from his grandfather and Polly both so that by the time he was sixteen he was nearly as well versed in making the book as Polly herself. 

Tommy had been barely a man when Polly’s world had collapsed, nearly taking them all down with it.  After Anna and Michael were stolen from her it had been like some mechanism inside her that had kept her going through all the previous trials had rusted away to dust. If not for Tommy they’d have all ended up in a workhouse, or worse, but it had been a close thing even so. After she’d recovered her senses it had become clear that he’d been holding things together by sheer force of will. Nothing like the brutal determination he’d develop after the war, but instead a tenacity born of desperation. 

Even then he hadn’t been one to reach out. Instead it had been his uncle who had come to her, nearly a year after she’d lost her children, after she’d finally given up all attempts to track them down through the police or the parish, all doors shut in her face in pity or contempt, and she’d collapsed into something like a stupor. Charlie Strong had cornered her while she was lighting candles for Anna and Michael in church, where she’d taken to spending most of her time in vigil in the pews.

“I don’t see Tommy much these days,” he’d said, his hat in his hand, and it had been anything but casual and even in the state she’d been in she could see through the gambit.

“What do you want?” she’d said, too tired and heartsick to beat around the bush.

“I’ve always stayed out of Shelby business.” Though he’d never spoken openly, Charlie had made it clear he disapproved of their operation, despite his own smuggling and the less-than-legal aspects of his scrap metal yard. She’d never understood his objections and he’d never bothered to make them known but she suspected it had more to do with her brother than any moral qualms.

“Are you looking for my praise? Get on with it.”

“What happened to you was beyond the pale,” Charlie said, nodding towards the candles.

“What would you know of it?” Polly snapped. 

“Nothing,” Charlie agreed. “I have no children, as you know.”

“So what’s your point, then?”

“My sister had children. I’m godfather to them all.”

“They’re mostly grown, or close enough. They can look after themselves.”

“If that was all there was to it I wouldn’t be here. But it seems to me that you’re the one being looked after, now.” Charlie shifted, his long face uncomfortable. He wasn’t a man of many words, Charlie Strong, and this was the most he’d ever spoken to her. “Maybe that was fair enough for a time, God knows you’ve been more than an aunt to them. And if you’re content to let your father’s business fail, I will make sure that they find other work. But you’ll have to ask yourself if any of that work will be enough to support you as well.”

“My father’s business is none of your concern,” she’d bristled. “And besides, last I looked at the books things were getting along well enough.”

“And when was that?” 

“When was what?”

“The last time you looked at the books.”

And she’d come up short. Part of her had wanted to demand who the hell he thought he was to be interfering this way. The rest of her couldn’t recall the last time she’d been in the shop, let alone paid any mind to the books. 

“Things are being handled,” she’d protested, but it had sounded weak to her own ears. “Thomas knows enough to keep--”

“Tommy’s capable enough.” Charlie had looked at her straight on for the first time. Somehow it didn’t sound quite like agreement. 

“He’d have come to me if--”

“You’re sure of that? ”

“You’ve made your opinions of the business clear. You don’t know enough about what we do to even begin to judge,” she’d scoffed. 

“True.” Charlie had studied the altar, as if asking the Lord to choose his words for him. “But I know my nephew. He’s as stubborn as his mother and too proud to admit when the water’s rising.”

And with that he’d given her a last searching look and left the church.

Because she was also a stubborn one, she’d refused to deal with the matter for another two days. But then she ran into Tommy by chance in the kitchen one morning. He’d been sitting at the table with the book in front of him, but when he saw her he flipped it shut and jumped up from his chair as if startled. 

“There’s tea,” he’d said. “And bread, if you’d like.”

She’d let him pour her a cup and settled at the table, eyeing the ledger with Charlie Strong’s words ringing in her ears.  She’d wanted to leave it, more than anything. 

Tommy had sliced her some bread and left it on a plate in front of her then poured his own cup of tea. The tea had tasted weak and watery and the bread stale, and at first she’d thought it was only a reflection of her mood -- she’d barely been able to taste food for months -- but when she went looking there was no butter or jam or even margarine to liven it up

“Did Arthur make the tea this morning?” she asked. Arthur was notoriously bad at the art of brewing proper tea. He never paid enough mind to the process from start to finish, and his tea was by turns weak or bitter.

“Hmm?” Tommy looked up from his teacup, distracted. “No.”

While she was up Polly decided to correct matters and make a proper pot, but when she pulled down the canister there was only a scattering of leaves left in the bottom.

“We’re out,” she said.

At the table, Tommy glanced away. “I’ll pick some up this afternoon.”

There’d been an off note to it all, Tommy watching her when he thought she wasn’t aware, skittish as an unbroken colt. And the thought had popped into her head that he’d never looked more like his mother. He certainly didn’t take after the Shelbys, with his wide set blue eyes and fine boned lines. His mother had always been a nervous creature and in her last years she’d lost herself in phantoms and superstitions and paranoia. Despite being the spitting image of her Tommy had been far too earth bound to ever strike Polly as much like her in any other ways, but again Charlie’s words came back to her. Stubborn and proud, he’d said. Those qualities were as true of the Shelbys as they were the Strongs, so she supposed Tommy had gotten a double dose.

“How are things in the shop?” she’d asked finally, fighting to keep the reluctance out of her voice.

Tommy had looked up as if surprised. His hair was longer than he usually wore it, stray locks falling into his eyes. He’d shrugged, sitting back in his chair. “The Worchester races are coming up,” he’d said. Despite the fog that had lingered in her brain she was still sharp enough to catch that it hadn’t been an answer.

“You’ve done the odds?”

“Yeah,” Tommy nodded. 

“How’s it look?”

“The usual.” His attention was fixed somewhere over her left shoulder. He picked up his teacup again, blowing on the surface even though when she’d sipped her own it had been far from piping hot. The edge of one of his cuffs was frayed against his bony wrist.

His mother had stopped eating after she found out she was pregnant with Finn, and Polly had never got out of her whether it was her spirits whispering to her or an attempt to rid herself of the child without resorting to the obvious methods. The pregnancy held on with horrifying tenacity all the same, turning her into a revenant, all hollows and shadows, every bit of sustenance stolen by the baby. Polly hadn’t understood it until now, that temptation just to let things run their course and waste away.

It would be so easy.

“I know I haven’t been around much--”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Tommy had interrupted, too quickly. And she’d accepted the reassurance and let it go. One more day.

 

The next morning there was no tea, and what bread was left had gone hard. When she went looking she found Tommy in the shop arguing with Scudboat. 

“I’m sorry, Tom. It’s just that I picked up another shift at the BSA. Look, the foreman is my wife’s brother. Let me talk to him for you, they always need good men, I know you could use a few extra--”

“A few extra what?” Polly had interrupted. It was well after they usually opened and Tommy and Scudboat were the only ones around, the place unnaturally abandoned for the run up to a race day.

Both men straightened at her voice. Scudboat had the good sense to look abashed. 

“Nothing, Pol.” Tommy had said, but he hadn’t quite packed away the grim apprehension with which he’d faced Scudboat. “It’s alright. You don’t need to--” 

“Scudboat, give us a moment,” she’d said. 

Scudboat glanced at Tommy and then nodded, disappearing out the front door. Tommy just stood there, chin lifted, waiting.

“Where is everyone?” 

“Aunt Pol--” 

“I asked you a question.” 

Tommy hadn’t been able to meet her eyes. He pulled out a chair at one of the tables and sank into it. It was all the answer she needed. 

“How bad is it?”

He lifted a shoulder, spoke to the table. “Betting has been down. Most of the men on our payroll have taken shifts at the factories when they can. I had to let a few go for skimming. It’ll swing up again, it always does.”

“If it’s just a dry patch, why was Scudboat looking to get you a job, then?”

“I didn’t want to…” Tommy trailed off. “You had more important matters to attend to.”

Polly had wanted to rage at him, to force him to admit just how dire things must be for him to be considering the factory. Wanted to demand where Arthur had been in all of this, why they hadn’t come to her before it got to this point. He sat before her with his head bowed, his hands laced together in front of him, and she saw that since the last time she’d really looked at him -- and God only knew when that had been -- what had been left of the childish roundness in his features had worn away. The day before she’d thought how he resembled his mother, but now the likeness struck again, pierced through the miasma that had settled over her in the past months. Because this morning he was all sharp planes and hollows in the pale light filtering in from outside, an air of high-strung strain about him that had never been present before. 

While he’d proven himself adept at the business the hired men had seen Tommy as a boy still, and she’d known that before calamity struck and the reins slipped from her hands. It didn’t help that he had always reacted badly to the drugging of horses to fix the races and everyone knew it. The other men viewed this as a weakness and when he wasn’t around sometimes she’d overheard snide comments that he saw the beasts as pets. They liked Arthur for a laugh or a drink, but they knew too well he wasn’t one to rely on to set the odds or keep control on the influx of cash or distribution of winnings. And though they had listened to her well enough since her father’s death, Polly was still a woman and any sign of impotence on her part became multiplied, especially in the wake of her brother’s betrayal, when they’d had to cut back the business and everyone in Small Heath knew they’d been robbed if not who had done the robbing. Rumors had spread and had never quite been stamped out.

Later she would get the story in bits and pieces, mostly from Scudboat. The men in the shop might have respected her but her neglect had exposed that respect as a precarious one. Discipline had plummeted in the wake of her inattention. More skimming before the count, more tipping off friends on which races were fixed. And the worst of it was how for a time she couldn’t bring herself to notice these things, or to care. What did it matter, with her children gone? The loss had made her weak, and weak was something you couldn’t be in this business. In this world. She hadn’t been able to stop them from robbing her of her children and that helplessness had infected everything else she touched. By the time she’d gotten her head above water again they’d nearly lost it all. 

As much as she had wanted to blame Tommy for that, she knew it had been her responsibility. He was just twenty years old. Or was it twenty-one? She’d lost track of time like she’d lost track of everything else. Polly was fifteen years his senior and had left everything on his shoulders while she’d refused to face reality and pined away after a lost cause.

So she’d taken a seat across from him and waited for him to look up from his hands. “How bad is it, Thomas?” she’d asked again, quietly.

And he’d flushed as if ashamed. “I’m sorry.” 

“Tommy,” she’d had to push.

“We need you back,” he’d said finally. “We need you back, Pol.”

That was the story of the Shelbys, wasn’t it? Clawing their way out of the pit only to be kicked back down again at any moment. Sitting in this posh house with its indoor plumbing and electric lights and mazelike hallways and attentive maids and space, so much open space, still felt like a dream to her, to the Polly of even a few years before. And it all due to Tommy’s bullheadedness where the rest of them would have been content to stick to the races and rule Small Heath. With each vault forward the ice he walked seemed to thin; if it had just been Tommy’s head on the line that would have been bad enough, but he’d dragged them all to the cliff’s edge with him when he stole those guns and caught Churchill’s eye and it seemed now they’d never be free. 

With the Russian business it wasn’t just a beating in an alley that would come of any misstep. God knew he’d tried to keep them out of it, but the threat had been explicit: do our dirty business for us or your whole family will hang. The same men who would never mar their shoes with the mud of Small Heath, who’d spit pikey and tinker in their faces, who wouldn’t dream of hiring Tommy legitimately, wanted to use his mind and his skill in getting around legalities to their own ends. 

Tommy of course had spun it as an opportunity. He was a gambling man, he’d said. But what kind of gamble was it if you couldn’t refuse the wager?

How long could the Russian business be suspended, now, without risking them all?

The priest had been a warning, that much was clear. Polly didn’t know his role in all of this but she’d seen enough in Tommy’s face, seen murder there. And she didn’t know if next time -- with these people there was always a next time -- he’d stop himself. If they were willing to tarnish his wedding and desecrate a wake, what would prevent them from intruding on the funeral tomorrow?

Surely they wouldn’t push him that far, not when they needed him for their little plot. 

Surely they knew even Tommy had a breaking point.

Just where that point was, Polly didn’t know for certain, and that brought back the dizzy free-fall she’d thought she’d put past her for good. There was no time for any of that now. So she shut it away.


	6. Chapter 6

“There’ll be others.” Tommy spoke before Polly had stepped fully back into the room and at first she thought the words were aimed at the casket, until he turned to her and continued on as if they were in the middle of a conversation. “There’ll be others. That’s what you said.”

She didn’t know what he was talking about. He was standing sentinel at the foot of the casket and they’d only left him alone an hour but even that much had apparently been a mistake. Give him space, Ada had said, but space was a void and a void needed filling. What had he filled it with?

When he moved she saw his gun was in his hand. Fuck. His face was--

“Tommy?”

He turned his back on her, the gun dangling in his grip. “Stop it.” His voice splintered and this time she really didn’t know who he was speaking to. If he was speaking to anyone, living or dead.

She didn’t ask him to give her the gun. She didn’t say anything at all. She just waited.

When he turned around again he blinked at her like he hadn’t expected her company. “Pol--” he said and then he broke off, loosening his tie with a clumsy jerk, yanking on his collar until it popped free of its fastening. He looked as if he might be sick.

This she knew how to handle. Polly risked moving closer. “Sit down,” she ordered, quiet. “It will pass.” There was a chair behind him and he let her guide him back into it.

In the time she’d been sitting with Karl the air in the room they’d chosen for the wake had gone thick and stifling, the lilies and roses giving off an earthy, cloying undercurrent. Tommy’s eyes squeezed shut and he leaned forward, head between his knees. He didn’t shake off her hand when she touched his back so she left it there between his shoulder blades.

“If you need to be sick, just do it,” she said. “It’s nothing that can’t be cleaned up.”

There was a sheen of sweat coating the back of his neck and what she could see of his temple and the side of his face. The gun slipped from his hand and thunked to the floor and she stopped herself from retrieving it.

“You said there’d be others.” The words were muffled by his lap.

“Other what?”

He didn’t answer. She would have suspected the smoke again but his eyes had shown no sign and there was no smell of it in the room and he wouldn’t have left Grace to do it elsewhere. So this was just Tommy. And grief. And no sleep and no food and a good deal of whiskey on top of it all. After a moment he straightened, leaving the gun lying where it had dropped.

“Did Ada take Charlie?” he asked.

Polly bit down hard on her worry. He’d been the one to hand the baby to his sister, an hour ago.   _He kept asking about Charlie_ , Ada had said at the hospital, but Polly hadn’t understood, not then. She wasn’t sure she did now, but when her own children had been taken she’d woken in the middle of the night and not known they were gone until she got up to check on them, and it seemed the mirror image, this forgetting.

“She’s putting him to bed.”

He nodded like she had confirmed what he’d already known but she was certain he hadn’t. Known. He hadn’t known at all. There were fresh bruises down the back of one of his hands that hadn’t been there before and his eyes were red rimmed and bloodshot. She knew better than to suggest sleep. They just had to get him through tonight, and then… tomorrow was tomorrow’s problem.

For no reason she could perceive the atmosphere of the room curdled, like the Garrison right before a fight broke out.

“If it would just fucking _stop_ ,” Tommy muttered. “All this fucking _noise_.”

Except for their breathing and the faint ticking of the clock on the other side of the room, it was silent.

“Tommy,” she ventured. Nothing he’d said since she walked back into the room had made sense and that realization wrung her insides like a dishrag, because his mother had been like this before Finn was born. Just like this. “You’ve been up three days. When you don’t sleep, sometimes you’ll hear--”

“In the tunnels,” he spoke over her as if she wasn’t there. The words came halting and detached. “It was a warning.”

He was all over the place and she struggled to keep up. “You’re talking about when the Germans broke through?” She’d only gotten the story from Ada, who’d heard it from Freddie. Danny and Freddie and Tommy, fighting under the ground in France, when Freddie had taken a bullet for Tommy. Freddie had told Ada they’d heard the Germans whispering from the other side of the dirt before the attack.

“No,” he said. “A voice. Calling my name. I ignored it, and then the whole fucking thing came down.” He lurched from his chair and was across the room before he’d quite stopped speaking.

Christ, did he mean the collapse?

A strangled cough shook him. He’d pulled his cigarette case out of his pocket and was fumbling with his lighter, the spark dying with every jerking attempt to produce a flame.

None of them had ever talked about the tunnel collapse. She’d found out about it from the bloody papers, from the brief list of the survivors.

He tried the lighter again but his hand was still clenched around the silver case and he hadn’t taken out a cigarette. Polly went to him, slowing when he took a truncated step back at her approach. She meant to take the case from him, help him with the cigarettes, but before she could he popped the case open then held it out in offering. If he was trying to cover this way it meant he was still aware she was there, aware of his own agitation. So she took two cigarettes and handed one to him after he’d pocketed the case again and this time when he tried the lighter a flame appeared. He bent to light her cigarette before lighting his own.

“Whose voice did you hear?” she asked, when he seemed to have regained himself.

He went still, the smoke from his cigarette curling around his head in a phantom embrace. “What d’you mean?”

“You said you heard a voice in the tunnels.”

He flicked ash onto the floor. Took a long drag. So he hadn’t at all meant to say anything, had he.

“It was a long time ago.”

It wasn’t, but there was no sense in pushing.

They smoked in silence and when she glanced at Tommy his eyes were closed, lashes dark smudges against his cheeks, the only part of him remaining to remind her of the child he’d once been. The scent of tobacco offset the flowers a bit but Polly had half a mind to call Mary to clear them away even so. Next to her Tommy shifted, taking in the room as if he’d just woken, before his attention was inevitably drawn to the casket. He took a faltering breath, let it out.

The day had been traditional enough even for a non believer, but Polly still felt an absence nonetheless. “I know you don’t pray,” she said into the quiet. “But would you mind if I lit a candle for her?”

“Do what you want,” he ground out, and then stalked away to find an ashtray on one of the low tables scattered around the room.

She debated whether to leave him until she remembered the bell, still unused to summoning a maid for her every beck and call like some helpless toff. But it did have its uses. Mary appeared promptly like she’d been hovering just outside the room, which she very well might have been. It was another thing Polly couldn’t adjust to: strangers in the house, the creeping, solicitous witness to all your life. She explained what she wanted and Mary set off again, looking pleased to have a task, then returned a few moments later with a large white wax pillar in her hands as if she’d had the thing prepared already, waiting for the summons.

“Where do you want it, madam?”

Madam. Polly kept herself from making a face at that and looked to Tommy, who was perched on one of the couches, hunched over an ashtray ignoring them, before she directed the maid to the head of the casket. Mary cleared one of the vases of flowers from a wooden stand and moved it in place, then set up the candle. When she was done she hesitated, her mouth thinning, and Polly followed her gaze to where Tommy’s revolver still sat abandoned on the floor.

“That’ll be all,” Polly dismissed.

After Mary disappeared Polly scooped up the gun. She crossed to stand over Tommy and held it out. “Put this away.”

He didn’t look up but took it from her and weighed it in his hands, then gripped it by the barrel and shoved it back in her direction.

“Tommy--”

“Just take it, Pol.” He’d already lit another cigarette and there was a half full tumbler of whiskey next to the ashtray as if he’d conjured it by magic.

“Where do you want me to bloody put it?”

“I don’t care.”

“Well, give me the holster, then,” she said.

He made an impatient sound and stripped off his suit coat, then peeled the straps of the empty holster away from his body and handed that over too. She slipped the gun into its holster and considered calling Mary back to take the thing away but decided that might be too far over the line of propriety for the poor woman. Instead she left it on the closed top of the nearby gramophone chest to dispose of later.

That done, Polly lit the candle with a match from the box Mary had left, and the sight of the flame glowing in the wax pillar settled something in her. She looked down at the casket and the still, dead face of Tommy’s wife and sighed. The trouble this one woman had caused, was still causing, even in death, this woman who had gotten Tommy shot and Danny Whiz Bang killed, who’d nearly started a war between them and the Fenians and got everyone slaughtered by Billy Kimber and his men. She wondered not for the first time if Ada had ever found out who had really given up Freddie the night Karl had been born.

It was hard, finding it in herself to pray for Grace. But Tommy had loved her and watching him be dismantled from the inside was as excruciating as it was unsettling, worse than when Greta had passed, because that death had been an extended thing, had prepared him for its coming. So she prayed that Grace’s soul would be at peace and she prayed that this peace would allow Tommy to move on, for his own sake and because so much was depending on him. And if that was all she could wish for Grace, God would just have to understand. She bowed her head, crossing herself.

“Do you really believe that makes any difference?”

She turned, startled by Tommy’s voice so close behind her. She hadn’t heard him approach and for the first time since Grace had died, she could read nothing in his expression at all; it went beyond his usual studied blankness to a total retreat from anything familiar to her.

“You know that I do,” she said carefully.

He wasn’t really focused on her, his gaze leaden. He’d left the cigarettes and the whiskey behind, his hands empty and loose at his sides, and he’d lost a cufflink somewhere, one sleeve gaping open to expose his wrist and forearm. “She says you told her if you saw her again you’d kill her.”

“Tommy--”

“But you pray for her. Now. Now that she’s…”

Polly waited, but Tommy didn’t finish, couldn’t say it. “Where do you think she’s gone, Thomas?” A slow blink and beneath that remote surface something stirred in the deep. “You don’t believe in God. Does your disbelief allow for a soul?”

He stared at her, riveted in place, his jaw clenched. “Fuck off.”

“Why sit a vigil at all if--”

He turned his back on her but didn’t walk away. “What did you pray?”

“That’s between me and God,” Polly said.

Tommy let out a mangled laugh, weaving an uneven path back to the casket. “Hear that?” he said to his wife’s corpse, venom leaking from him as he swept his arm to encompass Polly and the casket both. “Polly’s asked God to look after you, now that she got what she wanted.”

Jesus Christ. She realized far too late that he was truly off his head. You rarely could tell with Tommy and she could count on one hand the times she’d seen him incapacitated by drink, but he hadn’t eaten and had been surviving on tea and whiskey and cigarettes and opium for two days so this was inevitable, wasn’t it. She should have put a stop to it before things got this far.

“You think I wanted this?” Polly asked quietly. Even knowing he’d lost control, the words had stung. “You think I wanted your wife murdered?”

“I don’t think,” he said, stabbing a finger at her. “I know. You fucking told her you’d do it yourself. She says--”

And Polly caught it this time, the bloody present tense. “Just when did she tell you this?”

Tommy shook his head. “It’s the truth, isn’t it? Eh?”

Unease enveloped her in a close-wrapped shawl. He’d mentioned noise before, a voice calling in the tunnel. “Is she-- is she here? Now?” Tommy reeled as if Polly had slapped him. Pulled under by a current he could no longer fight, his eyes sank down to Grace before snapping up to Polly again. She found herself holding her breath and then the question popped out like her tongue had a mind of its own. “Is she speaking to you?”

Tommy shifted and she followed the movement to see that he was fiddling with something in his trouser pocket. His pulse flickered in a vein standing out on his temple.

“Tommy--”

“No,” he breathed. But whether it was meant as an answer to her question or a denial of the whole conversation she couldn’t say.

“That’s enough.” A new voice rang out, sharp and shocking in its interruption, and before Polly could turn Ada had already crossed the room and put herself between them, her face gone bloodless. “For fuck’s sake, Polly.”

Behind Ada, Tommy tracked them both like a spooked horse cornered in a paddock, his whole body tensed on the verge of bolting.

“Ada--”

“No, Pol. Just… go upstairs.”

When she hesitated, Ada gripped her arm and started walking her out of the room. Polly shook her off and retrieved the gun in its holster from the gramophone cabinet.  “Listen, Ada,” she insisted, the leather tangle that held the gun clutched to her chest, past caring what Tommy would think of her warning. “I’ll go, but don’t leave him alone, you hear me?”

Ada sized her up then glanced uneasily back at Tommy, who was still nailed to the floor where they’d left him, shoulders curled inward, a muscle jumping along his jawline.

It would have been better had Polly shattered his bones, that pain was the sort he could handle. She’d known he was veering toward the edge of a fucking cliff but she hadn’t expected the sudden eruption of rage aimed her way and in reaction her mouth had escaped her at the worst possible moment.

“He’s drunk,” she said, lowering her voice. “You need to bloody watch him, I mean it.”

Ada drew in a shaky breath. “I know, Pol. Please, just go.”

The right choice here was a fucking mystery but she was doing no good for anyone and she’d just have to trust that Ada could look after Tommy better than she’d done herself. So with one last apprehensive sweep of the room, praying that if any part of Grace lingered she would leave Tommy be, Polly obeyed Ada’s pleading and departed.


	7. Chapter 7

Three months before the wedding it had done nothing but rain. Endless rain that turned everything to muck, and in her private moments Polly had thought it an ill omen. No one had wanted to hear her opinion on the nuptials, least of all the groom-to-be, so she’d kept it to herself even as the canals overflowed, spilling rank water and leaving silt behind all over Small Heath.

She had just hung up her coat and stowed her dripping umbrella and frowned at the mud on her boots when Lizzie popped her head into the doorway of her office at Shelby Company Ltd., an odd expression darting across her face.

“Well, out with it then,” she’d snapped, pushing away all thoughts of the marriage.

“There was a call for you. Ms. Burgess would like to speak with you at your earliest convenience.”

Ms. Burgess. Polly just stared. “Did she say what she wanted?”

“No,” One of Lizzie’s brows lifted, tactfully ironic. “But she was quite insistent that you call her first thing.”

Polly took a seat at her desk and lit a cigarette. She’d taken care to avoid Grace since she and Tommy had returned from New York, baby in tow. She mostly saw Tommy at the office these days and they seldom spoke of anything outside the business. She hadn’t seen Grace herself since Charlie’s christening.

“Might as well see what she wants,” Polly muttered, and Lizzie flashed her one last look of commiseration before closing the door behind her.

The maid answered, naturally, and it took some time for her to retrieve the future Mrs. Shelby from whatever important business she got up to in that ridiculous house of theirs. Posing for another bloody painting, perhaps.

“Well?” Polly said when Grace finally picked up the phone.

There was a brief silence, and she could hear Grace take a breath. “Have you seen Tommy?”

Polly stilled. No beating around the bush, no double talk, just the bald question. “Not this morning, no,” she said. “Why?”

“Did he have business last night?”

Polly clamped down on the urge towards cheap innuendo about the whereabouts of Grace’s fiance. She might be less than pleased with the match but Tommy had been over the moon, worse since the baby arrived, walking around like a man who’d stumbled upon a burning bush, still half dazed with it. There was little chance he’d stepped out on Grace and Polly doubted she would fall for the suggestion. Keep to the facts, then, she told herself. No need to complicate things with Tommy more than they already were when he did show up for the day.

“No,” Polly answered. “He left the office at the usual time.”

“So no… *other* business, then?” Grace stressed the words in a way that twisted Polly’s mouth to hear. The woman knew full well who she was to marry but still spoke in code, as if to paint over the bits of his life she didn’t care for.

“Not that I’m aware. What’s this about?”

Silence then, and Polly felt the first stirrings of unease.

“It’s probably nothing,” Grace said as if speaking to herself. “He didn’t come home last night. Could you have him call me when he arrives?”

Before Polly could respond the line went dead. Part of her wanted to ignore the call, sure Tommy would walk in at any moment, brushing off any concern with excuses about some business or other.  As much as she wanted to chalk Grace’s call up to a rich housewife’s jitters, the problem was Grace was more than just a housewife and the fact that Tommy hadn’t married her yet had little to do with it. Grace had instincts, Polly would give her that much. Grace’s instincts had nearly gotten them all hanged, but only because her skill as a spy had served her so well. And Polly knew full well Grace wouldn’t have called unless she’d already exhausted all her own options.

The fact that Lizzie hadn’t heard from Tommy since he’d left the previous night and there was nothing in his diary until a meeting with the Birmingham City Counsel that afternoon did nothing to dispel Polly’s unease. So she went looking. And nobody had seen him at the shop on Watery Lane, or at the Garrison, and when she finally tracked down Arthur he didn’t know anything either. But when she traced her steps back to the office, Lizzie’s face was grave.

“Moss called,” she said, before Polly even got in the door. “Tommy’s been arrested. In London.”

Fuck.

Moss hadn’t had any details, he’d been tipped off by a copper he knew in Camden Town, a copper on Solomon’s payroll. Moss didn’t know the charges or why the hell Tommy had been in London in the first place, so she called the lawyer Tommy had on retainer and waited by the phone. But the man was useless. Was she sure Tommy had gone to London at all? Because there was no record of his arrest in London or Birmingham that the man could find. So she got on the train and showed up on Ada’s door without warning that night and the next morning she was at the precinct bright and early, the name of Moss’s contact in hand, but she was met with a stone wall of denial. Who was Thomas Shelby? Never heard of him.

Sure.

So that left Solomons, but to Arthur’s eternal chagrin Tommy’s relationship with Solomons had been cordial enough as far as she knew. Which meant next to nothing, of course. But she got a message to Moss’s contact and in the meantime had Ada check with her Bolshevik pals and another day went by as she paced Ada’s sitting room, waiting for the phone to ring.

The doorbell rang first.

When Ada answered the door with a sound of awkward surprise Polly hurried into the hall, half expecting Tommy himself, but found his woman instead.

Grace stalled in the doorway, eyes on Polly over Ada’s shoulder. She was quick, Grace, Polly had to give her that much. Whatever she felt at running into Polly was hidden before it rose to her face. A good skill for a spy, that. Polly didn’t bother hiding her own reaction, but then Grace already knew where she stood with Polly.

Ada waved them both into the sitting room and offered Grace tea, which Grace accepted, distracted and wary. Ada retreated on a flustered glare at Polly -- *be nice* that glare said -- leaving them together. Grace was in a sharp travelling suit and hat and she’d lopped off her hair since last Polly saw her, like all the girls were doing these days. She hovered with her purse in her hands, eyeing Polly like one might a rat stumbled upon in the shithouse in the dark.

“Sit down.” Polly ordered. “I suppose you’ve come looking for Tommy on your own, then?”

“I hadn’t heard anything after we spoke,” Grace said. “It’s been two days.”

The worry was real. She didn’t trust this woman a sliver and the entire foundation of her relationship with Tommy was built on lie after lie but whatever Grace felt for Tommy was real enough, she supposed. Worth making a cuckold of her respectable husband over. Polly took one of Ada’s armchairs and waited for Grace to do the same.

“You haven’t heard anything because there’s nothing to tell.” From what little Tommy had let on he was keeping Grace out of the old business. She’d wondered about that but Tommy hadn’t elaborated so she wasn’t certain the choice was due to Grace’s desire to keep her conscience clean or his own reasons. But Grace was bound to find out what little they did know, or make a nuisance of herself trying. “We heard he’d been arrested, here in London.”

“Arrested?” Grace’s alarm brought a cynical smile to Polly’s face. “That’s a little more than nothing.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Polly said. “But his lawyer found no record of any arrest, and neither did I.”

“I still have contacts with the--”

“Do you really think those contacts trust you, now?” Polly said. “Just what did you think you’d accomplish, coming here yourself?”

“He’s my--”

“Planned on walking into Alfie Solomon’s distillery and asking if he’s decided to turn on Tommy again, did you?” Grace couldn’t hide the lack of recognition of the name. “Even if they’d speak to you none of your contacts with the Crown are going to be any help when it comes to finding him. And besides, with Tommy, chances are being found is the last thing he wants.”

At that, Grace’s gaze sharpened. “If you really believed that you wouldn’t have come to London yourself.”

Well.

Ada chose that moment to break the tension, a tray of tea in her hands.

Moss’s Camden Town contact called just as they were finishing their very polite, very stilted tea. Careful prodding of Alfie Solomons had revealed nothing of use; either Solomons was lying and Tommy was dead, or Solomons was telling the truth and hadn’t seen him. The copper thought the latter more likely and shy of putting Arthur on Solomons -- a bad plan all around unless they got desperate -- that was a dead end. Ada’s Communist network produced nothing of use either; nobody had heard anything about a Shelby in London. And back in Birmingham, Lizzie still had no news.

“We’re going to have to reschedule everything,” Lizzie fretted. “Pol, I know he keeps things to himself but missing these meetings isn’t like him. He had three today. And dinner tonight, with Robert Ashford.”

Polly glanced back at Grace and Ada. “Listen, Lizzie. I’m out of leads here. Call Ashford and tell him something came up and I’m taking Tommy’s place. He knows me.”

“So, what did you find out?” Ada asked when Polly rejoined them. Grace had on her neutral mask but she was clutching her purse in her lap like she half expected Polly to tell her Tommy was in the morgue.

“Nothing, nobody’s seen him.” Polly considered her words. Until now she’d kept up an air of nonchalance about the whole matter in front of Ada and Grace, but the act was wearing thin. “I’m taking the five o’clock train back, there’s company business. If you hear anything, call Lizzie.”

“Shouldn’t we tell Arthur and John?” Ada asked.

Poly shook her head “They’ll just overreact. We’ll give it until morning.” She turned to Grace. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

Grace lifted her chin but had nothing to say to that, so Polly turned and left.

By the next morning whatever casualness she’d been able to maintain about the whole affair had vanished, leaving her unsettled and rough around the edges from lack of sleep. A third day of cancelled meetings and word of Tommy’s absence was bound to spread. She found herself retracing her search from that first morning and ended up in Charlie Strong’s yard, where the first soul she ran into was Curly, blessedly immune to  the drama of the past few days.

“Polly!” he greeted her, grinning. “Would you like some tea? Charlie and I were just--”

“You haven’t seen Tommy have you?” She didn’t expect anything but the question was automatic by that point.

“He didn’t want any, I already asked him,” Curly said.

She gaped at him. “He what?”

“Didn’t want tea. There’s plenty though, if you--”  
  
“Curly, you’ve seen him?”

“Well, yeah.” Curly stopped at the look on her face. “Did you need him? He’s with the mare who foaled.”

Polly blinked. If he’d been with a horse this whole fucking time, with a bloody *horse*, she’d-- she had to have heard wrong. “Where?”

“In the stables. It was a hard labor.” With that Curly was off, leaving Polly still reeling.

She gathered her wits about her and went looking. His voice came to her first, hoarse and soft, crooning to a fucking animal. “There you are, girl. Just rest.”

Polly stopped short in the aisle of stalls, feeling the blood rush to her head, before she continued on until she found the right one.

Tommy was stripped to his undershirt, sleeves shoved up to his elbows, squatting in the hay behind a tired mare while she licked the afterbirth off of a straggly slip of a newborn colt. “Just rest now. You did well,” he said, stroking the horse’s damp neck. His jaw was dark with stubble like he hadn’t seen a razor in days.

“Jesus Christ, Thomas,” Polly bit off.

The horse spooked, its head darting to attention to challenge her, and Tommy’s came up with it. He stared at her over the animals, wide-eyed, nostrils flaring, like she was intruding on something intimate. Like she was a threat.

“Your fucking fiance is in London, looking for you.”

He ducked his head and let out a breath and gave the horse another stroke down its flank before he carefully stood and stepped around the pair. “Not here,” he said.

“Because it might upset the horses?” Polly put her hands on her hips and refused to be moved.

“Yes. Because it will upset the horses.” Tommy yanked the cuffs of his undershirt down over his forearms, covering his wrists, but not before Polly saw that they were purple with bruises.

“So you were arrested,” she said, softer.

“Not here,” he repeated, and slid past her, grabbing his jacket from a hook on the wall of the stall and pulling it on over his undershirt as he went.

He led her to an open area where someone had left a rickety wood table and a couple of chairs and waited for her to sit. When she didn’t he dropped into one of the chairs himself, scrubbing at his face with one filthy hand.

“What were you doing in London?”

“I wasn’t,” he said. His voice was a thin rasp, like he’d been shouting. Whatever it was, he wasn’t going to tell her. Whatever it was, it had to be bad, for him to sound like that.

She was going to have to draw him out one way or another. “Moss told Lizzie you were arrested.”

“Yeah.”

“There was no record,” she said. “Your lawyer couldn’t find you.”

“They didn’t want me found.”

“What happened?” she asked, more gently this time. He didn’t look like he’d taken a beating, though he was holding himself stiffly in the chair and there were shadows of fatigue under his eyes. “Was it Solomons? Sabini again?”

Tommy was silent so long she was sure he wasn’t going to answer. Right when she was ready to give up and leave him to his secrets, he spoke. “It was Churchill.”

She had to have heard him wrong. “Churchill. Winston Churchill. What in God’s name--”

“I can’t go home like this,” he said suddenly. The words burst out on a little gasp for air, panic creeping in. “She’ll want to know what happened, I can’t--”

“Tommy,” she said slowly. “Grace was an operative for the Crown.”

“Was,” he said. “Was an operative for the Crown.” There was an undercurrent there she wasn’t sure she understood. “She--”

“Tommy.” He was pale under the grime, and Polly realized with a jolt he must be  wearing the same clothes she’d last seen him in, three days ago. “What happened?”

So he’d told her. Snatched off the street at gunpoint before he got to his car, taken to London and left to rot in a cell for two days with no idea why. Then brought before  Churchill himself and given an ultimatum.

“They paid for my ticket back to Birmingham, at least,” he’d finished with a bitter laugh. He didn’t explain what he was doing at the stables and she thought it wisest not to press.

“So you *were* in London.” The voice rang out from the doorway to the stables and Tommy went still. Grace stepped forward, exquisitely dressed as usual these days, every hair in place despite the rough surroundings, the line of her mouth a hard contrast to the rest of her finery.

Fuck. Polly nearly put herself between them at the poleaxed look on Tommy’s face. How much had Grace heard?

“Pol,” Tommy said, without taking his eyes from the mother of his son. “We’ll discuss the details another time.”

She never had found out what explanation Tommy had given Grace for his disappearance. Whatever it had been, preparations for the wedding occupied enough of her attention that she apparently hadn’t questioned him further. Either that or she’d known Tommy well enough to understand she wouldn’t get anything from him he didn’t want to tell.

In a way, Polly had Churchill to thank for finding out as much as she had from Tommy herself. If the man had only taken a more subtle approach she might never have learnt  about any of it in the first place. Dumping Tommy in prison and erasing all trace of him might have made some kind of point about who was in charge and what the consequences of refusal would be, but it had drawn attention to the whole bloody operation and shaken Tommy enough that he’d spilled. To her, and later to Arthur, when the Russians had shown up on his wedding day.

Grace had eventually got some of it out of him; the carrot, but not the stick. The stick he’d kept from her and Polly still didn’t know why, exactly. If he’d feared she’d leave him and take the child, or if he feared she’d demand a role in the dirty business herself. Whatever his reasons, whatever he’d feared, in the end the danger to Grace hadn’t come from that quarter at all.

Not that the stick had ever left them. And Jesus, what a stick it was.

 

Polly came awake with a jolt, her hand darting out to the nightstand where she’d left Tommy’s revolver, but something caught her wrist in a tight grip and that set her swinging her other fist and luckily she missed because she only caught Ada in the shoulder.

“Ow, fuck, Pol.” Ada’s face was a pale grimace in the dark. “Have you been training for the ring?”

“Holy Jesus,” Polly gasped, shaking her knuckles. “You’re lucky I didn’t put a hole in you.”

“I called your name but you must not’ve heard me.” Ada let her wrist go and sank down to sit on the edge of the bed. “I didn’t expect you to go for the gun.”

Polly’s heart ceased its mad rush up her throat and she sat up against the pillows. “What is it? What’s--” the awful scene of the vigil came back to her then and she frowned. “Ada, you didn’t leave him down there on his own, did you?”

“Johnny’s with him,” Ada assured, but her voice had gone thin. “Pol, he’s…”

“He’s what? What’s happened?”

Polly fumbled at the lamp until she found the switch. Ada squinted at the bloom of light and ran a shaky hand over her face.

“I don’t know. I don’t--” she bit her lip. “Nothing. It’s just…”

“Out with it. What’s got you up here scaring the wits out of me in the dark when you ordered me up here to begin with?”

“When Freddie… when Freddie went it was hard, it was so hard. But it wasn’t… He won’t talk to anyone and he won’t sit down and I’m afraid he’s just going to drop. I almost wish he would, it would be better than watching him go on like this.”

“Has anything changed, Ada? Do you want me to--”

“No, no. I’m sorry I woke you, Pol. I just… got spooked is all.”

Spooked seemed a far cry from mere worry that Tommy was going to collapse from exhaustion. “Ada,” she said carefully. “Did you see something?”

Ada wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You heard what we were talking about, before.”

“It’s nonsense, Polly. You shouldn’t have put ideas in his head.” Ada shifted, her hands wringing together in her lap. “He’s having enough trouble without that.”

“Did he do something? To spook you?”

“No! Polly, forget I said anything. It was silly, I just needed a break.”

“You know he might be hearing her, right? Hearing her talking to him?” Ada blanched, staring down at her hands. So that was it. “Ada, it’s not unusual. Sometimes they linger, you should know that. And even if she’s not, sometimes people, when they’re grieving--”

“I felt Freddie. When he went.” Tears spilled down Ada’s drawn cheeks. “He didn’t… he didn’t stick around, but he was there a few minutes. After. He didn’t say anything to me, but he was there. Polly, if… if it’s Grace… why is she still here? She has to know how he’s struggling. Wouldn’t it be kinder to leave him be?”

Polly gathered Ada’s hands in her own. Ada had never spoken of Freddie’s death, not like this. “I don’t think that’s how it works, love. Freddie died natural, he knew he was going. With Grace-- it was violent, Ada, and that can damage a spirit as much as it does everyone they leave behind.”

“Did you see her, down there?” Ada asked, her voice small.

Polly shook her head. “I don’t have that gift,” she said.

“Does Tommy?”

Polly went still. “I don’t know.” She squeezed Ada’s hands. “You said you got spooked. So what was it spooked you?”

Ada let out a little laugh. “Uncle Charlie keeps cats in the stables to chase off the rats, right? You know how sometimes you’ll see them watching things that aren’t there?”  Polly waited, let Ada come out with it in her own time. “I know he’s drunk. I know he hasn’t slept. He just kept… *listening.* But I don’t think he could hear me when I was speaking to him. He’s not really there at all right now.”

Polly frowned. “Ada, that might not be about Grace.”

Ada nodded. “I know. Freddie told me how it was for them, in the tunnels. I know… either way, Aunt Pol, it was… it was just unnerving, is all.”

“You’re sure you don’t want me to join you? Or you could get a little sleep yourself, and I’ll check in on Johnny.”

Ada gave her a tired smile. “No, it’s alright. Go back to sleep.”

Fat chance of that, Polly thought, but after Ada left again sleep took her all the same.


	8. Chapter 8

Another morning, and she woke as rested as she’d been for the past several days, which was more than she supposed she could say for anyone else in the house. Before she could dress there was a polite knock on the door and the maid, Mary, telling her there was a call for her down in the library. From the painter, Ruben Oliver.

Polly felt herself blush like a girl, and wasn’t that a sensation she’d long since figured she was too old to feel again? She asked Mary to tell Mr. Oliver she’d return his call and hastily dressed. The house was quiet when she emerged from her room, and though her first thought was to find Ada and check on Tommy, she decided no news was good news on that front and headed for the library instead. Mary had left the number next to the phone on Tommy’s desk but she still had the card he’d given her at the wedding in her hand, curled a little from nerves.

She had already given the operator the number when she realized with a jolt that today was Sunday, the day she’d been meant to start sitting for her portrait. His voice when it came on the line was warm and friendly and something in her chest unclenched at the sound and she was glad he wasn’t present in person to see her, red as it felt she had  turned at the mere sound of him.

“I heard,” he said, before she could get out much more than a greeting. “I’m so very sorry, I heard about your nephew’s wife.”

“Oh,” she managed. She sank down into Tommy’s chair and put a hand to her mouth.

“It was in the papers. Of course we’ll reschedule the session, whenever you wish,” he was saying, and there was worry there, but the worry was for her, not for his fee or his art. “You were there when it happened?”

She had to clear her throat before she could speak. “I was,” she said, marvelling at her own voice, how soft and sad it was. Did she feel that sadness? Maybe she did. There hadn’t been time for much other than worry and doing what needed to be done since it had happened.

“How terrible,” he said.

“Yes,” she swallowed again. “Tommy, it’s been--”

“For you,” he interrupted. “How terrible for you, I meant. To see someone killed. Someone you knew.”

Polly forgot sometimes that violent death wasn’t something her betters were used to witnessing outside the battlefield. Even so it touched her, his concern, however naive. Before she could find a response Tommy walked into the room, Johnny Dogs at his side. 

“Thank you, Mr. Oliver, for your call.” She knew she sounded cold and formal again but it was either that or she’d start weeping and she wasn’t that kind of woman, was she? 

A pause on the other end of the line, and then that warm, sweet voice again. “Please call me whenever you’d like. It doesn’t have to be about the painting. And relay to your nephew my condolences.”

Tommy had stopped just inside the doorway, watching her, Johnny still chatting at him in his blithe way.

She smiled. “Thank you. I will.” The receiver weighed in her hand like a promise, and she set it back in its cradle with care. 

Tommy was still in yesterday’s suit and seemed wholly oblivious to whatever Johnny was saying, a fact of which Johnny, bless him, was fully aware from the look he tossed her between rambles. Johnny was alright. Scratch that boyish surface of his and you reached something else altogether, something steady as an oak.

“I was just telling Tommy here about my cousin’s uncle’s grandmother. You know the one, eh, Polly? The one who swore she could talk to birds? I think you’re related, on your father’s side.”

She was reasonably certain Johnny had no such distant relative and was spinning the entire preposterous yarn as he went, as if to test whether or not Tommy was capable of calling him on his bullshit, which he clearly wasn’t.

“Yes, of course,” she said, because what else did you say to a question like that.

Tommy started for the whiskey and Johnny stepped easily into his path, clasping him on his shoulder and imitating his cousin’s uncle’s grandmother’s birdy speech, all the while steering him away from the liquor. It was deftly done. And before Tommy could outmaneuver him and head back for the bottle Ada whisked into the room, harried but already dressed in black, and led him away. The only real surprise was that he let her do it without putting up a fuss.

Johnny stayed behind, grin fading from his face the moment Tommy disappeared.

“Thank you,” she said, nodding towards the whiskey. “There’s been enough of that.”

Johnny shrugged. “He’s gone on holiday, Tommy has. Needs a little looking after.”

“Ada’s getting him ready?”

“That was the idea, anyway.” Johnny poured himself a drink and sighed. “When he was still talking he wanted to drive the carriage.” He said it like this would lead to a dreadful catastrophe.

When he was still talking. Polly considered this. “You mean the carriage that’ll carry the casket?”

“The very same.”

“I don’t see what’s… He’s a bit unsteady but it’s not far, and if someone else is there with him--”

Johnny frowned and Polly saw a deep concern there, underlying everything else. “It’s not that. We were just out in the stables, while Ada got herself freshened up.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“He’s spooking the fucking horses, is the problem. Can’t get near any of them. If we put him behind the reins they’re liable to stampede.” Johnny tossed back his drink and faced her, matter of fact. “I’ve seen it before. It’ll most likely stop after she’s buried.”

“You know Tommy. If he’s set on it, there’ll be no convincing him otherwise.”

“I almost brought someone in, but I didn’t think he’d take too well to the idea.”

“To drive the horses, you mean?”

“No.” Johnny set his glass down, peering at her evenly. “To help her move on.” Polly didn’t ask what he meant; playing dumb would serve no one. Johnny gave a little nod and continued. “I tried to speak to him about it last night, but he wasn’t up to listening.”

“He trusts Curly,” Polly said finally, addressing the concrete issue at hand. “And so do the horses.”

“You think he’ll be content to walk to the chapel with the rest of us, then?”

“No,” she said. “But at least he won’t be the one with the reins in his hands if the horses do bolt.”

“And the other problem?”

“Not much any of us can do about that right now, Johnny,” she said, making it clear the matter had reached an end.

Johnny knew better than to push further about family business, but he was worried for Tommy, she could see that. He smiled, a bit of his usual lightheartedness crinkling his eyes again, and any remaining doubts he kept to himself.

 

“The Reverend has arrived, Mrs. Gray,” Mary announced from the doorway to Polly’s  bedroom, where she was digging through the jewelry she’d thrown into her bag from home, looking for a suitable necklace to match her black dress for the funeral.

For an instant she’d thought the maid was talking about the priest who’d shown up at the wake, sending a surge of nerves through her before she realized her mistake, that it was Jeremiah downstairs and not that snake. 

“See him to the drawing room,” Polly said, pulling out a strand of jet beads. “And Mary? Gather up any whiskey and keep it in the kitchen, won’t you? If Mr. Shelby asks after it, make some excuse. And bring him some tea. With plenty of sugar and cream, if he’ll take it.”

Mary nodded, then hesitated. “Madam?”

Polly turned, fastening the necklace behind her neck. “Well?”

“After the funeral,” Mary said with a frown. “Will yourself or Mrs. Thorne be staying on?”

Polly paused. “That will depend on Mr. Shelby, I suppose,” she said.

“I don’t wish to overstep,” Mary said. “But it’s a big house. And Mr. Shelby has… he’s taken Mrs. Shelby’s death rather hard.”

It was delicately put. Polly couldn’t tell if the maid’s concern was for Tommy or for herself, if she was left alone to deal with him as he’d been over the past few days. Polly hadn’t thought much beyond getting him through to the funeral; the time after was too far in the future to contemplate. How much longer would Tommy tolerate any of them dogging his heels?

“We’ll see how it goes today,” she said finally. 

Mary pressed her lips together and nodded, slipping out of the room. Polly found her earrings and followed a moment later.

The door to the master bedroom was still shut and she could just hear the muffled murmur of Ada’s voice inside. Polly waited a long moment, feeling like a voyeur, but as she stood there silence fell. She’d just have to trust that Ada had things handled.

 

Dressed in his usual solemn black suit and white collar, Jeremiah was bent over a book too slim to be his bible when Polly found him in the drawing room. He rose from the couch at the sound of her heels and when the book turned in his hands as he stood she could see that he’d been reading poetry. 

“Rough night, then?” he asked gently after she joined him and they’d both taken a seat.

“Do I look it?” It came out more snappish than she’d intended, so she lifted the corner of her mouth to take the edge off. “Don’t answer that.”

Jeremiah’s own answering smile faded. “And Tommy? How is he?”

Polly shrugged, looking away. “I know you’d planned to speak to him about the service. But Jeremiah, he’s not--” Jeremiah waited but she found she couldn’t continue.

“Not doing much talking, is he?” It seemed more a conclusion based on experience than a guess. “When did it start?”

Polly turned to him. “Sometime last night, from what I’ve gathered. What do you know about it?”

Jeremiah frowned. “Polly--” 

“John let something slip, years ago. About Tommy, after the armistice. Jeremiah, if there’s anything you can tell me that might help...” Polly found her hands had clasped together in her lap, found she couldn’t unwind them.

Jeremiah glanced down at his shoes, then closed his eyes and sighed. “It was a long time ago. None of us were ourselves.”

Soldiers and their bloody code of silence. “He’s not himself *now.* John said it was bad, back then. I need to know what to watch for.”

Jeremiah nodded, but his eyes had gone distant. They got this look, all the men, whenever they spoke of the war, like it was at once something that had happened in the far off mists of time and yet still assaulted them in the moment. She waited him out while he let a long silence fall, before he spoke again. “Does he still hear you when you talk to him?” 

Polly went still. “Ada said he couldn’t, last night. When I saw him this morning I wasn’t sure. Did this happen before? In France?”

Jeremiah shook his head. “Not my story to tell. You understand?” The hell of it was she did understand. She knew full well what Tommy would think about her even asking. Jeremiah shifted in his seat. “Just don’t corner him, yeah? He might lash out if you do. Like a trapped stray.”

“It’s not like that,” she insisted. Tommy was nothing like bloody Danny Whizz Bang. “He’s just been off, is all. Since she died.”

Jeremiah set aside his book, gone suddenly grave. “Polly, if he gets confused, you call Arthur or John, or you find me.”

“Confused? What d’you--”

“You know what it would do to him, right? If he hurt you or Ada?”

Jesus. She was sure he would never…

“He got a gun on him?” Jeremiah asked.

Polly swallowed down another protest. “He gave me his gun last night.” She hadn’t understood why, but she’d taken it all the same. She didn’t know if he had other weapons in the house but he’d apparently promised his dead fucking wife there wouldn’t be, so that was something at least.

Jeremiah let out a breath. “Good. That’s good. He’ll do what he can, see? But you need to give him space.”

Space, right. Giving him space had led to opium and scorched silk and near disaster.

Before she could muster a response Jeremiah glanced up past her, towards the doorway, where Ada and Tommy had just emerged from the hall. Jeremiah stood again and she could see him assessing Tommy behind the careful composure that had fallen over him at the interruption.

Tommy’s hair was damp and curling around the edges and he was freshly shaven, though there was an uncharacteristic smattering of nicks along his jawline, still angry from the razor. She’d grown used to the strain around his eyes but now she noticed how sunken they were after so many days without rest, the bones of his skull pressing up through the flesh like rock emerging as the earth wore away. His dark suit was sharply pressed, a muted grey silk tie cinched and pinned under his starched collar, and the clothes seemed to be the only structure holding him upright. As if aware of their scrutiny his hand wandered up to the pocket of his waistcoat, fiddling with his watch, though his gaze floated past them without acknowledgment to the closed casket at the back of the room.

“Morning, Jeremiah,” Ada said. Though her hair was done up in curls and she’d put on the single pearl on its chain that Freddie had scrounged to buy her for their first anniversary, she too seemed held together by a fraying thread. She laid a hand on Tommy’s arm to get his attention and he stepped away from the touch automatically, a tic jumping under one eye.

Jeremiah gave Ada a nod of greeting, and when neither she nor Tommy ventured any further into the room, he and Polly crossed to join them. Jeremiah stopped a healthy  distance from Tommy and Polly followed his cue, moving to Ada’s side. “Hey, Tom.” Jeremiah said, his hands loosely clasped in front of him. “How you holding up?”

Tommy blinked like a child struggling to wake, then his gaze slid from Jeremiah to the casket and back again before seeming to focus for the first time since he’d come into the room.

“This a good time to talk?” Jeremiah continued, something solid and centered about him that nearly put Polly herself at ease for the first time in fucking days.  

Tommy cleared his throat, pulling his silver case and his lighter out of his pocket. “Yes,” he said, his voice catching. He let out a short cough. “Now’s fine.” The flame trembled a little as he ducked his head and lit a cigarette.

Ada gave a start when he spoke and Polly squeezed her shoulder. “C’mon, Ada. Did you have breakfast yet?”

She looked like she might refuse to leave Tommy, but Jeremiah smiled and took her hands in his. “Go ahead, love,” he said, “we’ll be alright.” Ada drooped a little in relief and let Polly lead her from the room.


	9. Chapter 9

The horses didn’t stampede.

It had taken a fight they’d all known he hadn’t the will to keep up, but in the end Tommy agreed to let Curly hold the reins of the carriage that would take his wife to her grave. Polly made certain he had the baby when it came time to carry the casket out of the house, so he stood at attention with his son in his arms while he watched Arthur and John and Finn and Charlie load his wife onto the carriage, before he joined Curly in the front. The fog he’d been lost in that morning had burned away since he and Jeremiah had spoken, leaving him as close to sober as she’d seen in days, raw with a grief that was hard to look at straight on for long.

The day of the wedding had dawned chill and drab, a grey pall hanging over the grounds that spit wisps of snow into the air, though no one save Polly had seemed to take note of it. This day was achingly bright, the wide expanse of sky cloudless over their heads as Curly urged the horses forward in the drive. Just as cold, though. Polly folded gloved hands into her coat pockets and shrugged deeper into her fur collar as she joined the small crowd of mourners following behind the carriage, Michael and Ada on either side of her, John and Esme and the kids just ahead. As the carriage crossed through the front gate and onto the road a light cascade of music drifted over them, seeming to materialize from the air itself. She turned, surprised, to find Johnny strumming a guitar as he walked with his family, head bent and uncharacteristically solemn as his fingers found the notes of a tune she remembered from her childhood but couldn’t quite place.

The music carried them down the rutted road towards the little private chapel where Tommy and Grace had married, and it felt to Polly like watching the undoing of time itself. But that was foolish; reversing the wedding procession would do nothing to erase the damage still spooling out in all directions, unleashed by a single bullet. Above the carriage she could just see the back of Tommy’s head, held erect and still, his cap dark against the unrelenting blue of the sky. She and Ada had come to an agreement: after the burial he was to eat and rest, they’d find a way to insist on it. And the whiskey was to stay locked up in the kitchen for as long as they could manage.

The walk wasn’t a long one but by the time they caught up to the carriage as it pulled to a stop next to the small plot adjoining the chapel, Polly was chilled through. The music continued, quieter now, as the horses stamped in place and tossed their heads skittishly  then calmed under Curly’s soft reassurance. Tommy handed the baby down to Ada and then braced himself on Arthur’s shoulder as he climbed from the carriage. When he turned to take Charlie back from his sister he stumbled, nearly staggering, Arthur catching his arm before he could go down. No one said anything as he was forced to take a moment, eyes closed and his face the color of milk, before he could step away from Arthur’s support. Ada leaned in towards his ear and he nodded at whatever she said and she kept the baby on her hip.

None of them attempted to stop him from helping to bear the casket this time, though Polly was sure his brothers took all of the weight as they lifted their burden from the carriage and carried it to the freshly dug hole where Jeremiah already stood, waiting, in his vestments. As they lowered the sleek honey-blonde wood box into the grave and the crowd gathered round, Polly scanned the road, sure the priest would show his face, that some terrible interruption would spring up, but nothing came. Charlie fussed in his aunt’s arms and though Tommy didn’t take him from her he turned to the baby, stroking his hair and hushing him until he settled and stared around at them all with wide, uncertain eyes.

At a nod from Jeremiah, Johnny finished his song, and after the last note faded silence lingered, the wind picking up and whirring through the bare branches of the lone tree that watched over the yard of the chapel. Jeremiah sought out Tommy and then stepped forward, the thin book he’d been reading back at the house in his hands.

“We gather today to remember our sister Grace Shelby,” he said, “to give thanks for her life and to surround those she left behind with our love.”

He didn’t announce a hymn. Polly couldn’t say she was surprised; Tommy had returned from France with little tolerance for music of any kind, abruptly leaving the room if a song started up. While as far as she knew he’d never outright forbidden singing at the Garrison everyone had known to avoid it, until Grace came along, that was. Grace had seemed to change all that. The last time Polly had been up at the house before the gala she had even caught him playing one of his wife’s records himself, something muted and instrumental, while he worked in the library.

The kids rustled restlessly while Jeremiah spoke of Grace’s love for Charlie and Tommy, her devotion to charity for Birmingham’s destitute children, and nothing of her dead, cuckolded first husband or the havoc she’d wrecked working for the Crown. Tommy stood next to Ada ramrod straight with his hands clasped behind his back, his cap pulled low over his eyes, the line of his jaw tight. Charlie let out a hoot, one little hand pointing somewhere over their heads toward the chapel. Tommy’s chin lifted to follow, but Polly could see nothing but old stone and ivy and a heart-faced barn owl perched on the roof. As she watched a pair of rooks dove squawking out of the nearby tree, sending the owl off with a silent sweep of feathers, before circling back to triumphantly take its place.

Jeremiah left off his praise of the dead. Instead of scripture he opened the book of poetry. “Tommy asked me to share this passage from the poet Gibran, whose words Grace loved,” he said, then continued:

> _For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?_
> 
> _And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides,_
> 
> _that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?_
> 
> _Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing._
> 
> _And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb._
> 
> _And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance..._

The mention of God in this stripped down, secular service stood out, but it was a reminder that Tommy was the atheist; his wife had been a believer, if a Protestant. Polly wasn’t one for poetry but to her ear the verse rang more of Grace than Tommy, though it sounded like the romantic sort of thing he would have liked before France, back when he’d gotten lifted by the police for stealing books. Before any mention of God had twisted his mouth into a sardonic line.

She was pulled out of her thoughts by movement around her and looked up to find Michael holding out a long stemmed white rose. Jeremiah had invited the mourners to place flowers on the grave, so she took the rose from Michael and waited until Esme and John had stepped back to make room. Ada set Charlie down and helped him toddle to the edge of the hole in the earth, where he tossed a mangled handful of petals and then erupted with a peal of laughter as they twirled in the wind. When Ada lifted the boy back into her arms her face was crumpled and wet, her nose pink. After Polly had laid her own rose she meant to use the break in the service to check on Tommy, but there was a gap in the small crowd where he should have stood. Ada saw her searching and frowned, but before either of them could do anything more about it Jeremiah stepped forward again.

“We brought nothing into the world, and we take nothing out. We now commit Grace Shelby’s body to the ground: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

It didn’t take long after the close of the service for the widower’s absence to be discovered. Arthur joined her side, his long face uncertain. “You seen Tommy?”

She shook her head, meeting Ada’s worried eyes over the baby’s head.

“Maybe he went back to the house,” Ada ventured, but she didn’t sound like she believed it.

No one had seen him slip away. Arthur stalked off, calling Tommy’s name, and Polly didn’t have the heart to tell him not to bother.

“Well, he didn’t take one of the horses,” Charlie reported. Which was frankly a relief; God knew he’d probably break his neck if he tried riding, the state he was in.

A gust of chill wind sent them all into a huddle, scanning the road back to the house for him, but it was bare and empty of people as the land around it.

“He’ll turn up,” Polly said. “C’mon. There’s food and tea back at the house. Let’s get the kids inside and warmed up.”

Curly turned the carriage and took his place leading the procession and Polly ushered the crowd to fall in behind him. Jeremiah caught her lingering at the back as they took off down the road.

“As you said,” he said, quietly. “He’ll turn up, when he’s ready.”

So he’d guessed at her intentions. “I’ll just check the chapel and be along.”

“Leave him be, Polly,” Jeremiah urged, not without compassion.

Polly looked past him to the grave, where a couple of men from the house were waiting with shovels to cover over the fine wood and the hothouse flowers with dirt.

“I’ll only be a moment,” she said.

Jeremiah gave her a nod and left to join the rest of the retreating mourners.


	10. Chapter 10

Icebox cold, the chapel closed around Polly like a tomb, and at first she thought it empty and that her effort would have been better spent with the others up at the house. Then there was movement at the front of the chapel, where Tommy had stood watching the Calvary escort Grace in her purple veil while the choirboys sang above their heads. Polly hesitated with her back to the heavy wood doors, pulling her coat closer. The only light came from the narrow stained glass windows set high in the stone walls, filtering the sun into weak, bluish beams that failed to quite reach the floor, leaving the depths lost in shadow.

The chill that had crept over her during the funeral sank into her bones. It wasn’t Tommy at the end of the aisle.

“A lovely service,” the priest said to the bare altar, “if unconventional.” Polly thought the man was addressing her, until he went on. “Your wife admired Khalil Gibran, did she?”

And that’s when she noticed Tommy.

Bare-headed and hunched against the wood in a dark corner beneath the inbuilt pulpit, Tommy sat in the back row of the pews on the side the Shelbys had filled to overflowing during the wedding. Polly went still as he straightened, his attention riveted on the priest’s broad back.

“Did she recite it to you,  _The Prophet_?” the priest continued. “Curled together like kittens by the fire in your grand house, among all those books you hoard like gold.”

Neither man had noticed her. She could just see the stony planes of the side of Tommy’s face as he stared a hole into the back of the priest’s head.

"Perhaps you know this passage, then: _For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning._ "

The verse rang out, echoing faintly against the walls, twisted by the priest’s flat, exaggerated brogue. Polly pegged the man to be the type to want to savor his target’s  reaction, but he didn’t turn away from the altar. Instead he climbed the steps and stood under the extinguished ring of the chandelier, looking up at it like it was a crown to be placed onto his head by God Himself.

“Arrogant, to expect you could keep gold and love both, Mr. Shelby. Did you think it just pretty words, this prophecy? Did she whisper this bit to you on your wedding night?” Filling the space at the front of the chapel with the sureness of an actor on stage, his voice carrying with the practice of years at the pulpit, the priest made the poetry sound like something obscene, something near a threat: " _Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, so shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth._ "

Tommy leaned forward then, head bent and elbows on his knees. “What the fuck do you want?”

The priest half-turned with a smile like the curve of a scythe. “Tatiana will go to the factory. Tonight. With or without your escort.”

Tommy buried his face in his hands.

“A period of mourning was to be expected, but the Russians have a timeline.”

“I’ve already told her it’d be a mistake.” Tommy pulled out his cigarette case and popped it open, then snapped it shut again with a huff as if just remembering he was in a church. “She’ll pull the whole fucking plan down around all our heads if she’s noticed, which she will be, because she doesn’t fucking know the meaning of the word discreet.”

The priest nodded. “I’ll have a word with her aunt. Buy you a couple of days. But it will come with a cost.”

Tommy didn’t ask what that cost might be.

The priest turned then and stepped down from the altar, deflating back into the false humility he’d worn at the wake. When he saw her standing at the door he quickly pasted on the genial, self-mocking smile from their last encounter, but she’d seen the flicker of surprise there before he’d been able to hide it. Good.

“Father Hughes,” she greeted, making sure to bar his way as he approached the doors of the chapel. The priest raised a brow and sent a look back at Tommy, who appeared to be ignoring them both, though she knew him better than to believe it. “Oh, I didn’t get your name from Thomas,” she continued. “Please thank your parish from us. For the generous gift to the school. And for the flowers.”

“Mrs. Gray,” he acknowledged, pointedly waiting for her to step aside.

“A priest who fails to genuflect when leaving a church,” Polly tutted. “But these are modern times, I suppose.”

“The Blessed Sacrament isn’t present here,” Hughes said acidly, “As you well know.”

Polly held her ground another moment until common sense and an ingrained respect she couldn’t shake even for this man moved her feet before she’d quite made a decision. Hughes slid past her out the doors without another look back, as if she and Tommy had ceased to exist for him. She turned to find Tommy staring straight across the aisle at the rows of pews Grace’s family had filled with their sour, inbred faces.

“Everyone worried when you disappeared on us,” Polly said, tracing her way up the aisle until she stood in the path of his gaze. “Did you know he’d be here, that priest?”

Tommy’s eyes fell closed and the breath he took was shaky.

“Got everything figured out, do you?” he said, but there was nothing behind the words and they didn’t answer her question. She supposed the answer didn’t matter much.

“Come back to the house. Mary has soup on for you.”

Tommy shook his head, then scrubbed at his face. “I have business.”

“You mean the Duchess?” He just looked away, back toward the altar, so Polly pressed on. “The priest has it handled.”

He rose from his pew and descended to the aisle, pushing past her when she didn’t give way, so she reached out to catch the sleeve of his coat and he spun in her grasp, one of his hands coming up, then stopped himself abruptly, his arms dropping to his sides, and took a careful step back out of her grip.

“A few days,” she said, when he didn’t make a move either to speak or to leave. “Tommy, Hughes said he’ll buy a few days.”

His face twisted. “You think a Duchess will listen to a bloody parish priest?”

“I thought she took orders from her aunt,” Polly said. “It might benefit you to learn from her example.”

“Oh, so now you’re giving orders, eh?” he laughed. “It’s one thing to hold your troops back in reserve. It’s quite another to send them over the top. From one general to another, it pays to know which the situation requires.”

Jesus, she thought, and then apologized silently for the blasphemy. Just hours ago he’d been among the shell-shocked. If he tried to go to London, to deal with the Russians, the state he was in…

“So which is it? Are you the general or the grunt? Because I thought generals kept themselves out of the fighting.” The worst of it was, at heart she knew he was right. Despite the tragedy, despite the fact that he should have had time -- weeks, if not months -- to recover from this blow, they needed him back, soon. They needed him and he was far from capable right now even if he didn’t see it. “Maybe this isn’t a matter for soldiers,” she said, changing tactics. “You told me the Grand Duchess was the one in charge. Maybe this is best approached as women’s business.”

Tommy leveled her with a dead-eyed glare. “Their Cossacks will shoot you before you reach the door.”

“I know you’ve tried to keep us out of it, but you’re not the only--”

“We’re surrounded by razor wire, one wrong turn and we’ll be sliced to pieces, do you understand?” Tommy bit off. “Churchill showed me  _files_ , Pol. He had one on your father. My father. Did you know he went to America? Because the Crown does, they know which pub he got pissed in before he boarded the ship. Churchill has enough to bury _every one of us_ several times over.”

He yanked his cap from his coat pocket and shoved it on his head, pulling it down to shield his eyes, and as he did she could see a silver chain wrapped tight around the back of his hand, a glint of deep blue clenched in his fist. The bloody sapphire. He was still carrying the fucking thing around with him.

“Think, Thomas. Just take a moment and think. When you’re exhausted you miss things, make mistakes. She died in front of you. Anyone would be--”

“For five years I watched everything around me die while I carried on, do you really think one more is enough to--”

A screech like rusty hinges on the gates of hell snuffed out his words and pinned them both in place. A feathery blur swooped over their heads, circled near the doorway and returned, its broad white wings outspread, shrieking again as it dove lower this time, forcing them to instinctively duck for cover. The banshee let out another scream and then landed atop the head of the statue of the Virgin that was perched up in one corner of the altar.

Polly reined her heart back from its gallop. Under his breath, she could hear Tommy muttering what sounded like another line of poetry.

“ _...whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day…_ ”

The barn owl -- maybe the same bird the rooks had chased off during the funeral -- let out a high-pitched squeaking trill, fluttering its wings fussily, then stared down at them, glossy eyes impassive, as if content to have delivered its message.

Holy fuck. Polly found herself making the sign of the cross before she was quite aware of it. She called Tommy’s name twice before he turned away from the owl and in the false dusk from the chapel windows he’d gone chalky as one of the old statues in the city museum.

“As you said, it’s a delicate matter.” Polly struggled to shake the jitters, to pick up the thread of the argument where it had broken off. “Think practically: you know you need sleep before you deal with the Russians. Let Hughes take care of it for now.”

Hatred seeped into his face at mention of the priest, followed by something else she couldn’t identify, creeping in around the edges. He shook his head but she wasn’t certain it was in answer to her words, so when he didn’t outright object she took the chance to forge ahead.

“Charlie asked after his mother the other night. He doesn’t understand what’s happened, he’s going to need you.” Polly shifted, trying to catch his eye. Appealing to the memory of his dead wife was a risky wager at best but she was edging toward desperation, certain if he tried to go to London now the odds were against him coming back unscathed. “Grace was a smart woman; you know she’d say the same if she were in my place. She’d want you home with your son, she’d want you to give yourself a few days rest so that when push does come to shove you’ll be ready.”

“You think you know what she wants?” Tommy rasped.

The present tense again. Fuck. “What does she want, Thomas? Do you know?” He blinked hard as if a flash bulb had gone off in his face and she hesitated, uncertain, before the words stole away from her of their own accord. “Maybe you should listen to her. Maybe she has something she needs to tell you.”

The owl screamed again and Tommy flinched like they were hearing a murder rather than a bloody bird. He glanced down at his spread hands and then wiped them on his coat, the sapphire still dangling from its chain.

“Charlie,” he said faintly, then cleared his throat. “He’s--”

“Back at the house, with the others.” It was automatic by now, this reassurance.

“Back at the house with Mary?” he echoed, scrubbing at his hands again, before slipping the damned jewel back into his coat pocket.

Polly frowned. “Yes, I suppose he might be with Mary.”

The lack of certainty seemed to set him off. “We’ll need men at the house. Soldiers.” He’d gone breathless, words coming fast as bullets. “Tell Arthur to send John.”

“Soldiers? Tommy, Arthur and John, they’re already--”

“Ada, just do it, make sure…” he broke off, staring at her as if he’d come unmoored and she was the pier drifting into the distance.

 _If he gets confused_ , Jeremiah had said. She’d thought if there was trouble, it would be about the war.

“Pol…” For a moment he seemed to focus and then he paced away from her, his voice thin, talking to himself. “He’s fine. He’s fine.” When he reached the pews on the other side of the aisle he gripped the wood railing with both hands, his head falling forward and his shoulders contracting as he fought to control his quick gasps for air. “It’s alright. He’s fine.”

“Of course he’s fine, Tommy. Why would he--”

“The priest, the priest has people, in the house. They put a card under Charlie’s pillow. A warning.”

Polly’s own breath caught, her stomach dropping like a stone into a deep well. “What? When?”

He stalked back to her side of the aisle then turned toward the owl as if seeking its intercession. “What am I supposed to do?” The owl just ruffled its feathers and rocked from foot to foot on its perch, keeping its own counsel.

“Tommy-- Tommy, listen. We can go to the house, now, and you can check on him yourself.”

He nodded as though he’d heard her. Then: “Did you call Mary?”

Fuck. Get Arthur or John, Jeremiah had said. But it was just her in this chapel and there was no phone and she wasn’t about to leave him like this. “Tommy--”

“Did you?” His voice climbed, strangled.

So she did the only thing she could think to do, she played along, trying to remember what Ada had told him in the car the night Grace died. “Yes. Yes, I talked to Mary, she’s at the house with Charlie. John’s there with the Lee boys.”

He nodded again, fumbling in his pocket, pulling out his cigarettes and lighter, his hands shaking too badly to open the case. Without thinking she moved to take it from him and before she knew what was happening the silver case and the lighter had clattered to the floor as Tommy wrenched away from her, his face cracking open with mute animal terror.

She hadn’t yet found enough of her wits to speak past her shock when the chapel doors swung open, the gold light of late afternoon spilling through. If it was the fucking priest, back to toy with Tommy, she didn’t know what would happen.

“Polly?” It wasn’t Hughes, thank Christ. Jeremiah stepped into the doorway, peering into the dimness of the chapel.

At the sound of his voice Tommy’s legs went out from under him and he dropped, hard, to sit against the pews opposite her.

Jeremiah hesitated, taking in Polly and Tommy on their separate sides of the aisle, the cigarette case and lighter lying on the floor between them.

“Sun’ll be down soon,” he said into the quiet. “The carriage is outside.”

When neither she nor Tommy acknowledged him, Jeremiah slipped his broad-brimmed hat off and took another step further into the chapel. Tommy shifted, tilting his head back against the dark wood behind him and drawing up his knees. After a moment he gave Jeremiah a small nod. He looked as if he might not be able to stand under his own power.

“Why don’t you let Curly give you a lift back to the house, Polly. Me and Tommy, we’ll be along in a bit,” Jeremiah said, and it was less an offer than the gentle instruction of a shepherd to his flock.

Polly wavered, torn between a rush of relief at the offer of escape and shame at her own desire to abandon the wreckage. Tommy pulled his cap off, his hair plastered to his forehead despite the chill. He was already mostly back to himself but there was something fragile about him now, like one wrong word might split the fractures running through his foundation for good. She’d known he’d been pushed well beyond his limits but still she couldn’t reconcile it, this fragility, or the bald fear of her that had been in his eyes, no matter how briefly.

Above their heads the owl let out another piercing trill and Jeremiah glanced up at it in surprise.

“Alright,” she said, half to herself. Half to the owl, if she was being honest. She bent to gather the cigarette case and the lighter from the floor where they’d dropped. “Should I send Curly back for you?”

“That’d be good, yeah,” Jeremiah agreed as she handed him Tommy’s things.

She paused in the arched doorway and looked back to find Jeremiah hunkered down next to Tommy, his hands cupped around the flame as he lit a cigarette. Tommy accepted it from him wordlessly and as the smoke enveloped their heads like the screen of a confessional, Polly let the chapel doors close them in.


	11. Chapter 11

The sun sank low on the horizon and the wind picked up, gone icy again, while Polly stood with her back to the blazing windows of Arrow House and watched Curly head out on his return journey to the chapel. Though she’d often thought Tommy’s place more than a little bleak, after the stone chapel it was blissfully warm inside. A maid took her coat from her in the hall and she found everyone still in the long dining room, well into a subdued feast.

After she joined them she didn’t have the heart to do more than pick at her plate. Across the table from her Ada was propped on one hand, nearly nodding into her glass of wine. Michael, carrying a whole slew of questions with him she had no answers to, came by to kiss her cheek and tell her he and Lizzie had an early morning and were heading back to Birmingham, and then Arthur slid into the seat next to her and from the looks of him he had questions too. Everyone had questions and from moment to moment it was still doubtful the man with the answers was even up to speaking. The weight of those questions left her tired beyond belief.

“Jeremiah’s with him, then?” There was a deep well of worry in Arthur’s eyes that only faded a little at her nod. “Good. That’s good, Pol.” It took her too long to catch on, but it seemed like maybe he was trying to reassure her.

The only good thing about it was Jeremiah had a knack for not saying exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment, where everything she said and did right now sliced through Tommy like a hot knife in butter. They’d been counterweights for so long, she and Tommy, but the balance had been upset in a way she didn’t know how to restore. Back in that chapel she’d crashed headlong again into what Ada and Jeremiah had seen in him and tried to warn her about, the thing she’d been trying her best to convince herself was a temporary condition. Because the alternative might not just mean an end to this new life they’d all so quickly settled into. It might bring a death sentence.

Something had to give. Polly sipped her wine and came to a decision.

Following dinner the family lingered for a while in scattered clumps around the drawing room, but when it became clear Tommy wasn’t going to show his face they started to trickle out the door and Polly found herself with Tommy’s son in her arms for the first time since all this started. Teetering on the edge of tears, Charlie wore the dazed look babies got when they’d been passed around too long by a crowd of well-meaning adults.

“Poor little chick, it’s well past your bedtime,” she said. He was too worn out to fuss much when she settled him in his crib. As she covered him with his blanket what Tommy had said in the chapel came back to her. The priest had people in the house. Christ, no wonder he’d been so fixated on the baby. No wonder.

By the time she got back downstairs the house had emptied out and Ada was by herself in the sitting room, curled up on one of the couches nursing another glass of wine.

“Before you ask, I haven’t seen him,” Ada said when Polly joined her.

“Wasn’t going to ask,” Polly replied. Ada just raised a brow. “But we do need to talk.”

Ada didn’t push while Polly gathered her thoughts and her nerve. “I know the burden has fallen on you these last couple of nights,” Polly started, “and I know you’re probably as tired as Tommy by now. But Ada, I don’t think it’s best for anyone if I stay here any longer. And I know it’s unfair to you, but we can’t--”

“It’s alright, Pol,” Ada said with a weary smile. She didn’t seem the least bit surprised. “I wasn’t planning on going anywhere. Not for awhile, anyway.”

Polly looked down at her hands. “There’s a lot going on. I need you to be certain you can handle it.”

Ada looked far from certain, but there was a stubborn set to her jaw, and the disconcerting resemblance to Polly’s mother struck her anew. “Anything I need to know?”

“Probably,” Polly said. “But I don’t know how much he would want me to tell you. How much is safe for you to know.”

“I think maybe the less I know the easier it is for him,” Ada said gently. “Easier to be around me, I mean. I can just…”

“Be his sister?”

Ada smiled. “Yeah.”

It struck something in her, that. Tommy hadn’t been just her nephew since he'd been Finn's age, and there was no changing it now.

“His worrying, about the baby,” Polly started, unsure how much she should say.

“It’s only natural, after what happened to Grace.”

“No, listen, Ada, it’s more than that. It’s to do with the Russian business.” Ada apparently knew enough for her face to go grave. “There was a threat, before Grace died, I think. I don’t know the details and I don’t know what he’s done about it, but it’s not just shock driving him.”

“Okay,” Ada said thinly. “Polly--”

“And that priest,” Polly went on. “You don’t let him in the house. Don’t let him around Tommy if you can help it.”

“Do you think he’ll try?” Polly didn’t have a good answer for that and Ada seemed to read it in her face, because she just gave a sharp nod and moved on. “Anything else?”

There was a note of challenge in Ada’s voice Polly wasn’t sure how to take. Whether through childish rebellion or genuine principle, since she’d been old enough to understand what they did more often than not Ada had stood at odds with the family business. Sometimes it was hard to see any difference between her principles and her rebellion, especially when she’d been younger and she’d loudly condemned them all while using family money to buy the fine dresses and high heels she’d preferred. After she married Freddie and her ties with the Bolsheviks had deepened she’d refused anything from them at all, her principles winning out, until the attack from Sabini’s men had spooked her enough to accept the house Tommy had bought her. Polly thought the whole thing silly; what was family for but to look out for one other? God knew no one else was going to do it. But Ada’s ingrained wariness of them still lingered.

“If he starts smoking opium again you fucking call me.” Not that there would be anything she could do to stop him. She wasn’t even sure anymore if stopping him was the best choice. Maybe John had it right, all those years ago. “Look, you get a good night’s sleep tonight, and we’ll talk again in the morning before I leave.”

Ada rose, taking Polly’s hand in hers. “It’s going to be okay, Pol. We’ll get him through this.”

Polly watched her go and kept her doubts to herself.

 

It was early yet, but after Ada retired Polly felt like a spirit haunting the empty house, so she headed for the comfort of her borrowed bedroom, newspaper in hand. God only knew what had been happening in the world as their own little private drama played out. But before she could change out of her black dress and shut herself in for the night she heard a low mournful sound climb into a muffled whine.

“Hush, sweetheart,” she said before she was quite in the nursery. Charlie let out another whimper at her voice. He was standing up in his crib, clinging to the railing, and when she neared he held his arms out to her.

Polly lifted the baby out of the crib and turned toward the nearby rocking chair only to find it already occupied by Tommy, still in his overcoat, cap loosely rolled in one of his hands. Limp with sleep, his head tilted to the side and nearly resting on his shoulder, he looked more flattened with exhaustion unconscious than he had awake. She hadn’t known he’d returned to the house but here he was, a failed guard in his son’s nursery. She shouldn’t have been surprised.

“Mum-mum-mum,” Charlie sobbed, fat tears gathering in his eyelashes.

“Shh, it’s alright,” she whispered, bouncing him while she tried to gauge how quickly he’d go back down, whether to take him to her own room to let Tommy sleep.

Then the decision was taken out of her hands as Tommy started upright with a sharp inhale.

“It’s just me,” Polly said quietly. The wild uncertainty faded from him as he straightened in the chair, staring up at her. “Mary lit a fire in one of the guest rooms for you.”

Tommy rubbed at his eyes and for a rare moment the resemblance with his son was striking. Then he nodded. “I told Jeremiah to take it.”

“Thomas…” She caught herself and let it go. After all, he’d been sleeping well enough in the chair before she'd woken him. “You should know. Ada’s going to stay on for a bit, to help out.”

“So you’re not. Staying on,” he guessed tonelessly.

After everything that had happened, after the way he’d looked at her in the chapel, she’d thought the news might come as a relief to him, but his expression was sealed against her, leaving her flustered. “Michael and Lizzie have been handling things at the office the last few days. I thought they could use a little guidance tomorrow, before things get too mucked up.”

“Hmm.” Short and noncommittal and utterly unreadable.

Before she could muster a response Charlie started crying in earnest, squirming in her grip and reaching out towards his father. Polly lowered the baby down to Tommy and Charlie clung to him, sniffling, as Tommy brushed the tears away from his cheeks with his thumb, tender in a way he rarely showed since the war.

She lingered, hating how things had been left, but Tommy had settled Charlie against his chest and was rocking him gently, face buried in his son’s hair, so she swallowed anything else she might have said and closed the nursery door behind her.

 

The King might have declared the end to the monarchy for all she was able to absorb of  the news. She found herself straining to listen for any disruption in the quiet house but none came, and finally she folded the paper and pulled on her robe and crept back to the nursery, unable to stop herself. But nothing was amiss; at least nothing more than usual since the gala had torn a hole through their lives. Father and son were asleep together in the rocking chair.

She didn’t expect it would last long, this peace, but she left them where they were and retreated to her room where she packed her bag so in the morning she wouldn’t be tempted to change her mind and stay. As she did she found Ruben Oliver’s business card, left out on the top of the dresser next to her jewelry. She traced the calligraphy of his name with one finger and then slid the card into her jewelry case, a fond smile blooming across her face. If things settled down in the next week maybe she’d have the chance to call on him in London. It would be nice to spend time with someone untouched by all the upheaval.

After she crawled into bed it took a long time for sleep to take her. When it did she dreamt the owl from the chapel flew a silent search through every room in the house until it found her outside the nursery and shrieked at her with a flutter of white wings and a show of sharp talons, before settling on the back of the chair where Tommy and Charlie slept, a defiant warning shining in its fathomless black stare.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm always interested in what people listen to when they're writing, or playlists for their fic. I didn't have a playlist for this one, just several albums I played repeatedly for days on end, especially White Chalk.
> 
> Soundtrack: 
> 
> PJ Harvey: White Chalk (album)  
> Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: The Boatman’s Call (album)  
> Feist: The Water  
> Cillian Murphy’s two recent BBC radio shows but especially Lisa Hannigan: Swan, Fionn Regan: Midnight Ferry Crossing, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh & Thomas Bartlett: Kestrel  
> The Million Dollar Hotel (soundtrack)  
> Nico: The Marble Index (album)  
> also a lot of Radiohead  
> and more Feist during editing, especially Metals and Pleasure.


End file.
